173 square feet. Three years in. Here’s what nobody tells you.
When I tell people I live in 173 square feet in Jordan, I get one of two reactions. Either sympathy — a slight head tilt, a “oh, that must be hard” — or fascination, a rapid-fire stream of questions about how it’s even possible.
Nobody ever says “that sounds great.”
But after three years, I’m here to say: it actually is. Not despite the size. Sometimes because of it.
Here are ten things I’ve genuinely come to appreciate about living small in Hong Kong.
1. Your bills are almost embarrassingly low
A 173 sq ft flat takes almost nothing to cool, heat, or light. My electricity bill is a fraction of what friends pay in larger flats. I once went so long without hitting a minimum water charge threshold that I had to double-check I hadn’t forgotten to register. Small space, small footprint — and I say that both literally and in the sustainability sense.
2. You stop buying things you don’t need
This one surprised me. When you have no room for anything, you become a ruthless editor before you even get to the checkout. Every potential purchase gets the same question: where exactly would this live? Most things don’t survive that question. Three years in, I own less than I ever have, and I genuinely miss nothing I didn’t buy.
3. The things you do own, you actually appreciate
The flip side of owning less is that everything you kept earned its place. I know exactly where everything is. I use almost everything I own regularly. There’s a quiet satisfaction in that which I didn’t expect — a kind of intimacy with your own possessions that larger homes make almost impossible.
4. Cleaning takes twenty minutes
Including the bathroom. I’ll leave that there.
5. Location becomes your living room
This is the HK-specific benefit that Western tiny house content completely misses. My flat is minutes from Tsim Sha Tsui. Every museum, restaurant, park, and MTR line is essentially my extended living space. The city does the work my flat doesn’t have to. Living small in Hong Kong isn’t a compromise — it’s a trade, and it’s often a very good one.
6. Your life gets simpler, so your time opens up
Less space means less to manage, less to clean, less to organise, less to worry about. That time goes somewhere. For me it went into work I care about, into this blog, into walking the city more. Living small didn’t shrink my life — it clarified it.
7. It makes you genuinely creative
As an architect I spend my professional life solving spatial problems for clients. Living in 173 square feet means I’m solving them for myself, daily, at 1:1 scale. Every storage decision, every furniture placement, every lighting choice is a design problem with real consequences. I’ve become a better spatial thinker from living here than from almost anything in my professional training.
8. You become very good at knowing what you actually want
Small space living is a continuous negotiation between desire and reality. You can’t have everything, so you get very clear very fast about what matters. That clarity has a way of bleeding into the rest of your life in ways that are hard to fully articulate but very easy to feel.
9. Guests are memorable, not routine
Having someone over to a 173 sq ft flat is an event. It requires intention — from me and from them. The visits that happen are the ones people actually want to make. There’s something to be said for that.
10. You prove something to yourself
This might be the one I value most. Every day I live well in this space is a small argument against the idea that quality of life scales with square footage. It doesn’t. It scales with design, with intention, with how clearly you understand what you actually need. Living here has made that argument convincingly, to me, every single day for three years.
Life is defined by yourself. Every experience enriches you — just go do what you want to do.
— Angelica
Angelica is a Hong Kong-based architect living in a 173 sq ft flat in Jordan. The Acute Living documents the design thinking behind small space living.
