For decades, the prototypical dream house was one you would hardly need to leave. Under its roof would be abundant rooms, both private and public, as well as spaces for work and leisure, formal and informal eating areas and a basement for storing wine or surviving an apocalypse.
Today, many Americans would say that their dream house is simply one they can afford. Many aspiring buyers are scrutinizing their personal values along with their finances, sorting out not just where they want to live, but how.
Since January 2023, The New York Times’s Living Small column has featured people throughout the world who have realigned or recommitted themselves to such values by selecting homes that emphasize simplicity, efficiency or compactness. Here we offer several of our favorites in the series.
In all cases, limited dimensions inspired boundless imagination.
She Turned a Barbershop Into a Home
Liz Gilson has spent much of her life in cramped quarters, happily residing for years at a time on boats or in retrofitted vans. Given the chance to buy a tiny former barbershop in a historic textile mill complex in Burlington, N.C., she was all in. A prior tenant had added a small kitchen and bathroom, but the 345-square-foot house was sorely lacking in storage. (It came with a single drawer.) Ms. Gilson acquired furniture-making skills and was able to build a patio for her new hot tub.
A Brooklyn Apartment Packed With Plants
A self-trained interior designer who specializes in small spaces, Alejandro Aguilar created his best advertisement with his own apartment, which he rented for $1,350 a month in an industrial section of Brooklyn. Having packed all 350 square feet with ingenious mirror placements, hand-wrought furnishings, colorful collectibles and scores of houseplants, he noted in 2023 that “everywhere you sit there’s always something to look at, from every angle.”
Many readers said they found Mr. Aguilar’s maximalism exciting and uplifting. Others described it as distracting and exhausting. No one denied that it was unique.
Curtains, Not Walls, Divide This Apartment
In the early 1990s, Vernes Causevic and his family fled wartime Bosnia and Herzegovina for England, where he became an architect. He founded the London studio Project V Architecture with Lucy Dinnen, and they opened a second office in 2017 in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital. Notable among their projects there was their own residence in Sarajevo’s Grbavica district, an area once occupied by Serb nationalist forces who regularly attacked civilians. In an apartment house that was once a snipers’ perch, the couple created a 538-square-foot refuge. Saffron-colored wool curtains divide the space, offering not just flexibility but also a reminder of the bedsheets that walled off the views of vulnerable homes to protect them from bullets.
A Rare Surviving Bolt-Together House
In 2021, sight unseen, Gemma and Nick Warren bought a tiny house in the western Catskill Mountains of New York. The timber structure lacked plumbing and heating but still cast a spell online, and no wonder.
It was a rare example of a Bolt-Together House, built from plans first published in 1972 by Family Circle magazine. Designed by Jeffrey Milstein in a utopian age of architecture, the Bolt-Together House was lauded in Lester Walker’s “Tiny Book of Tiny Houses” for its affordability, good looks and ease of construction. Mr. Milstein himself visited the Warrens’ renovated dwelling and pronounced it surprisingly comfortable.
Wild Colors Make This Space Seem Bigger
What can one do with a splinter of a space that is smaller than a child’s room? Beatriz Ramo López de Angulo and Bernd Upmeyer, architects in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, transformed a 74-square-foot storage space into a retreat with a living-dining area, a loft bed, a hot tub and a sauna. Working in their free time over a decade, the couple divided the micro unit into four distinct areas defined by exuberant materials like black marble, fluffy chartreuse fabric and patterned ceramic tile. The space, which they called the Cabanon in tribute to a tiny vacation home Le Corbusier designed in the south of France, has not only hosted friends and family members but also serves as a laboratory for the architects’ ongoing work in affordable housing.
She Built Rooms Within Rooms
Sometimes, squeezing more functions into a small space doesn’t require a complete gut renovation. In this London apartment, which already had a renovated kitchen and bathroom, the architecture firm Suprblk installed a wall of custom cabinetry containing myriad collapsible components. As well as providing storage, the unit contains a sofa, two beds, an entrance closet, stools, a dining table and a desk. And the vivid green color wrapping the floor, walls and ceiling help make the whole composition look just as appealing as any piece of designer furniture.
A Cabin That Can Stretch Open
If only every house could simply expand at will. When the owner of this cabin moved from New York to rural Vermont to establish a sheep farm, she saw great promise in a shape-shifting cabin created by Cabin ANNA, a Dutch company. Depending on the weather, different sections of the home can be rolled apart on tracks, allowing it to function as a closed, cozy cabin in winter or a platform for open-air lounging and bathing in summer.
More Than One Tiny Home
Compared with large, expensive homes and estates that require constant maintenance, smaller spaces tend to be less of a drain on both money and time. A couple of surfers took that lesson to heart when they sold their big, upscale apartment in The Hague to pursue a lifestyle that allows them to chase waves all over Europe. They replaced their old living space with three tiny homes — a small fisherman’s cottage in The Hague, a compact getaway in Sardinia and a camper van — allowing them to travel when and where they want.
A Personal Railroad and Rolling Home Office
Tiny homes on wheels have grown in popularity for years, but this weathering steel and glass structure in Carnation, Wash., doesn’t just have wheels — it also has its own train track. The owner, Lou Maxon, designed the home office with help from the architect Tom Kundig. It’s informed by Mr. Maxon’s passion for trains and railroads and powered by an electric motor. The track is only 110 feet long, but it’s enough to make Mr. Maxon’s daily commute feel magical.
The Bed in a Lacquered Box
Studio apartments don’t always seem to provide a lot of flexibility for furniture. Most people simply push a bed into a corner or install a Murphy bed. The architecture firm Messana O’Rorke’s inventive solution in this 450-square-foot Manhattan studio, however, was to build a stand-alone sleeping cube in the center of the space, with a lacquered exterior and felt-lined interior, and position other living spaces around it. The result makes the studio feel larger than it is and transforms the bed into a desirable design feature.
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