If you are standing in a small apartment right now — or looking at one online, trying to talk yourself into it or out of it — this is for you. I’m an architect based in Hong Kong, a city that has been building and living in micro apartments longer than almost anywhere else on the planet. When I was looking for my own place, I chose a 15 square metre studio flat in the middle of the city. Not because I had to. Because when I walked in, I saw something most people viewing that flat would have walked straight past.
This is what small apartment living is actually like, from someone who does it professionally and personally — and what I wish someone had told me before I started looking.
How to read a small apartment floor plan — what I saw that others missed
The flat is 15m² in Jordan, Kowloon — one of the densest urban neighbourhoods in one of the densest cities in the world. By the numbers it sounds extreme. In practice it works better than most larger apartments I’ve visited, and the reason comes down entirely to layout.
The first thing I noticed was the kitchen orientation. The kitchen runs parallel to the entrance corridor, which means the corridor doubles as food prep space. In most studio apartments, you lose a strip of floor in front of the open kitchen — space that sits dead when you’re not cooking and cramped when you are. Here, that problem doesn’t exist. The living area gives nothing up to the kitchen.
TYPICAL STUDIO / 一般開放式廚房
THIS FLAT / 本單位佈局
Entrance corridor · 入口走廊
Kitchen 廚房
Dead zone 死角
Living area (reduced) · 起居室（縮小）
Corridor
Kitchen
Full living area
完整居住空間
Kitchen work zone · 廚房工作區
The second thing was the balcony door — a sliding folding type that folds completely flat against the wall when open. No door swinging into the room, no visual barrier, no interruption. When it’s open, the indoor and outdoor space become one continuous area. In a small apartment in a city like Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Singapore, that moment of expansion every morning is not decorative. It changes the feeling of the whole flat.
SWING DOOR / 普通外開門
SLIDING FOLD DOOR / 摺疊移門
Balcony 露台
Blocked by door · 被門阻擋
Balcony 露台
Folded 摺起
Full wall usable · 整面牆可用
Continuous space · 室內外空間連通
The third thing was the walls. Three of the four main walls have no openings — no doors, no windows cutting into them, no structural intrusions. Just flat, usable surface from floor to ceiling. This matters because every opening on a wall creates a dead zone around it. You can’t place furniture in front of a door or directly beneath a window. Pure wall is rare in small apartments and it is genuinely precious. I counted three and made my decision.
INTERRUPTED WALL / 有開口的牆
PURE WALL / 純牆面
Door 門
Window 窗
Door clearance · 門前淨空區
Window
clearance
窗前淨空
Usable wall area · 可使用牆面（縮小）
Shelving flush to wall · 書架貼牆
Wardrobe 衣櫃
100% wall usable · 100% 牆面可使用
Why a bigger apartment isn’t always more liveable
When I told people the size, a few suggested I look at slightly larger options — 20m², 25m². The reasoning seemed sound: a bit more space, not much more rent, surely better?
But in small apartment living, size on paper and size in practice are different things. I looked at several of those slightly bigger studio flats. Most had kitchens jutting into the living area, requiring clearance. Balcony doors that opened inward and blocked a wall when open. Windows positioned awkwardly, making furniture placement difficult. One had a structural column in the middle of the room that divided the already-small space into two even-smaller zones.
The extra square metres were real. But the extra usable square metres — after accounting for the spatial inefficiencies built into the layout — were far smaller than the number suggested. In some cases my 15m² with its clean walls and open corridor outperforms a 22m² apartment with a poorly considered layout on almost every practical measure.
This is what professional training gives you that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had it: a floor plan is not just a number. It’s a set of spatial relationships. Some layouts are generous. Some are quietly self-defeating, regardless of how many square metres they contain.
Location is the square footage you don’t pay for
The flat sits between three MTR stations, each about five minutes on foot. I can get anywhere in Hong Kong without thinking about routes. Buses in every direction, cross-harbour connections, highways — all accessible without planning.
Downstairs there are restaurants at every price point. A wet market two minutes away. Multiple gyms within walking distance. I have never needed to think about what’s available near me, because the answer to almost any question is: yes, and it’s close.
And then there’s the view, which I did not expect. The flat looks out over a basketball court, a football pitch, and a park. In a city this dense, an unobstructed view to open green space is genuinely rare. I can see sky that hasn’t been replaced by someone else’s windows. A sliver of sea on clear days. At sunset the court turns orange for about twenty minutes.
Trading square footage for that felt, to me, like an extremely good deal. This is a trade-off available in every dense city — Tokyo, Singapore, London, New York. The smaller the flat, the more you can spend on the neighbourhood around it. The city becomes your living room.
What you actually give up in a small apartment — being honest
I want to be straight about this, because the post where everything is perfect is the post nobody believes.
You give up hosting. I have had friends over — two at a time, sitting on the bed, which is also the sofa, which is also the reading chair. It works when everyone is relaxed and nobody is counting chairs. But a dinner party is not happening here. If hosting matters to you — and for some people it genuinely does — I wouldn’t pretend that small apartment living is fine. It might not be.
You can’t ignore your own mess. There’s nowhere for clutter to hide in 15m². Everything left out is visible from everywhere. This is either clarifying or exhausting, depending on the week. I’ve made peace with it by being deliberate about what I own. But that took adjustment.
Bad days feel smaller. When everything is in one room, you can’t escape to a different part of the flat to decompress. This surprised me more than anything else. What helped was having one corner that felt specifically calm — a chair by the window, good light, nothing cluttering the floor nearby. Your mental health corner doesn’t need to be large. It just needs to exist.
What you don’t give up
Comfort. The flat is warm in winter, breezy in summer with the balcony open, quiet enough to sleep well. I wake up at 6:30 most mornings without an alarm — partly because the light comes in early and the space doesn’t trap me in the dark.
Aesthetics. The clean walls and the open plan give me more design freedom than most larger apartments I’ve been in. There’s nothing to work around.
Money. The difference between this flat and a mediocre 22m² in a similar location is several thousand Hong Kong dollars a month. Over a year, that’s a trip somewhere interesting. Over a few years, it compounds into something more meaningful. Wherever you live — Hong Kong, London, Sydney, Singapore — the rent you’re not paying doesn’t disappear. It moves somewhere more useful.
The one thing that makes or breaks a small apartment
I’ve seen a lot of small spaces — professionally and personally — and the ones that feel genuinely liveable versus the ones that feel like punishment come down almost entirely to one variable: natural light.
A 15m² flat with a good window and morning sun feels completely different to a 15m² flat that faces a lightwell or another building. The numbers on paper are identical. The experience of living in them is not. If you are looking at small apartments right now, I would take a slightly worse layout with better light over a better layout in the dark, every single time.
Ceiling height is the second thing most people miss. A small apartment with 2.8m ceilings feels open. The same flat at 2.4m feels like a compression chamber. Check the drawings. Measure if you can. The difference is invisible in a listing photo and enormous to live with.
I chose the smallest apartment I could find. I’d make the same choice again — but for the same reasons I made it the first time. Not because small is a philosophy. Because this flat, with its parallel kitchen and its folding balcony door and its three clean walls and its view of a basketball court at sunset, was the right space for the life I actually have.
The listing said 15m². What I bought was a good layout, a great location, and a balcony that becomes a room every morning when I open the door. In any city, that’s the deal worth looking for.