How to Live Well in a 36m² Flat – A Furniture Maker's Tour

GUIDES · SMALL SPACE LIVING

A four-minute tour of Furl founder David Norman's 36m² London flat: colour-washed walls, a sofa bed in the living room, a king size storage bed in a 3m × 3m bedroom, and no wardrobe.

In This Film

• 0:00 Welcome to my 36m² London flat
• 0:20 Living room: colour wash (Farrow & Ball No. 302 Tailor Tack)
• 0:56 Why a one-bed flat needs a sofa bed
• 1:24 Kitchen and office: keep it minimal
• 1:52 Clutter isn't a dirty word: where to keep things
• 2:20 Choose slim, multifunctional furniture and use the walls
• 2:58 Bedroom: 3m × 3m with a king size bed
• 3:16 A storage bed instead of a wardrobe
• 3:44 Dark walls (Farrow & Ball Inchyra Blue) and blackout blinds for better sleep

Thirty-six square metres is small. It is a one-bedroom flat with a living room that has to be a kitchen, an office and a guest room, and a bedroom that has to hold a king size bed with enough room to walk round it. Most of what we make at Furl exists because of flats like this one, so it seemed fair to show how we live with it ourselves. The film above is the tour; what follows is the thinking behind each decision, with the numbers.

Colour Wash The Walls And Ceiling

The first thing to change in a small room is the ceiling. A white ceiling over coloured walls draws a hard line at the top of every wall, and the shadow where they meet tells your eye exactly how small the room is. Painting the walls and ceiling in the same colour – colour washing – blurs that line. The corners soften, the shadows go, and the room reads as one volume rather than a box with a lid.

The living room here is Farrow & Ball No. 302 Tailor Tack on both walls and ceiling. It is a warm, pale pink that goes almost neutral in daylight, which matters in a room that also has to work as an office at nine in the morning.

A Sofa Bed, Not A Sofa

In a one-bedroom flat in London you will always have someone who needs to stay. Friends passing through, family, and in this case a young child who needs a bed of his own when everyone is here. The sofa in the living room has to be a proper bed, not an emergency one.

The sofa bed in the film is the Furl Tokyo. Two things make it work in a room this size. The arms are slim, so it takes up less of the wall than a conventional sofa of the same seat width. And the mattress is 18cm deep – the same on every sofa bed we make – which is the difference between a bed you can sleep on every night and one you apologise for. Every Furl sofa bed opens to a 200cm-long bed, in widths from single (80cm) to super king (180cm).

Keep The Kitchen And Office Minimal

The living space has to hold the kitchen and the desk as well, and the only way that stays calm is by being a little bit conscious about what is out. That is not the same as owning nothing. It is choosing what earns a place on a surface, and keeping the rest somewhere it cannot be seen.

Clutter Isn't A Dirty Word

We are conditioned now to clear the clutter and free the mind, and there is something in that. But there are things you want to keep: photographs, pictures, the things that come with you from house to house. You do not want them on display and you do not want to throw them out. You need somewhere to put them.

In this flat that means storage built into the furniture rather than added to the room. Choose sofas and chairs with slim arms and storage underneath. Put shelves on the walls instead of cabinets on the floor – a shelf that holds books and magazines can double as a picture rail. Treat the walls as art and the floor as space.

A King Size Bed In A 3m × 3m Bedroom

The bedroom is exactly three metres by three metres, and it has a king size bed in it. The bigger the bed, the better you sleep, but there is a limit in a room this size: you still want bedside tables, and you want as much floor around the bed as you can get so the room feels like a bedroom rather than a mattress with walls.

A king size bed in a 3m × 3m room means there is no wardrobe. That was a deliberate trade – sleep over hanging space – and it only works because the bed itself is the wardrobe.

The Bed Is The Wardrobe

The bed is a Furl Air storage bed. From the outside it looks like a standard bed frame on tapered wooden legs. The whole mattress platform lifts, and underneath there is up to 38cm of storage across the full footprint of the bed. Clothes go in boxes inside it, and so does everything else that has no other home in a flat this size: the iron, gym equipment, cases of water.

If you are weighing up a storage bed against a wardrobe, the arithmetic is simple. A king size bed is 150cm by 200cm. That is three square metres of storage, 38cm deep, in floor space you were going to use for a bed anyway.

Dark Walls And Blackout Blinds

The bedroom is painted dark – Farrow & Ball No. 289 Inchyra Blue, again on walls and ceiling – and it has blackout blinds. Sleep is the priority in this room, and the single biggest improvement to it has been making the room completely black at night. A pitch-black bedroom is a different quality of sleep. If you try one thing from this film, try that.

The Numbers

Flat: 36m², one bedroom, London.
Living room paint: Farrow & Ball No. 302 Tailor Tack, walls and ceiling.
Sofa bed: Furl Tokyo. 18cm mattress; opens to a 200cm-long bed.
Bedroom: 3m × 3m. King size bed. No wardrobe.
Bed: Furl Air storage bed. Up to 38cm of storage under the full mattress.
Bedroom paint: Farrow & Ball No. 289 Inchyra Blue, walls and ceiling. Blackout blinds.

See Them In Person

The Tokyo and the Air are both in our London showrooms at 73 Fairfax Road, NW6, and 604 King's Road, SW6. Everything is handmade in Nottingham, and you can live with it for 60 days – love it or return it.

Full Transcript

Lightly tidied from the film, in David's own words.

Hello, I'm David. Welcome to my 36 square metre London flat. Let me show you around. It's not going to take very long. So, this is our living space.

This was the room I was most worried about when I first saw it, because it's just a box. The first thing I did on moving in was redecorate. And one of the tips I would suggest to anybody in a small space is colour wash. Colour wash is when you paint the walls and the ceiling the same colour. It kind of blurs all the lines.

It tricks your mind into thinking you've got a bigger space, and it eliminates a lot of the shadows you associate with the traditional coloured wall and white ceiling we've all grown up with. So, colour wash first. Then the choice of furniture. Of course you need a sofa bed in a one-bedroom flat, because living in London you've always got friends who want to come and stay with you. We have the same.

I also have a young child who needs a room in this flat to sleep when we're all here. So, the sofa bed is a really important part of the living space. And it's compact. It has to be compact. And it has to be comfortable.

This space has to work really hard, and it does. We've got the kitchen. We've got my office. It's quite minimalist, intentionally. And that is the secret, I think, to enjoying the smaller space.

Just be a little bit conscious about what you have out and what you accumulate. Clutter isn't a dirty word. I know we're conditioned now to clear the clutter, free your mind, and I strongly believe that is relevant. But there are things we just want to keep as we move house, as we accumulate stuff: photos, pictures, just stuff we want to remember. We don't necessarily want to have it on display.

We need somewhere to keep it. So, in my flat, I've got plenty of storage inside the storage chair. Don't choose sofas with big bulky arms. Choose minimalist-looking furniture that is practical and multifunctional. I love multifunctional.

I believe it improves the way we live. Use space wisely. Put storage on the walls rather than in cabinets sitting on the floor. There are clever ways of doing this, with shelves that double up as hooks, magazine racks, all sorts of stuff. You can do clever stuff on the walls and treat your walls as art.

My bedroom is exactly 3m by 3m, and I've got a king-size bed. Now, the bigger the bed, the better you sleep. But there's a limit to how big the bed can be in your room, because you want bedside tables and you want as much space as possible around the bed to make you feel nice in your bedroom. This bedroom doesn't allow me to have a wardrobe, because I chose a bigger bed. I'm prioritising sleep.

But the bed has got storage inside, where I keep my clothes neatly in boxes, and other stuff like the iron, the gym equipment, bottles of water, and things I don't necessarily want on display. The bedroom is set up with dark walls, a dark ceiling and blackout blinds, because sleeping is a priority. One of my favourite features of this bedroom is that I can make it completely black. When you're sleeping in a bedroom that is pitch black, you sleep really, really well. So, I'd recommend you try that. Blackout blinds, dark walls: it makes all the difference.

Clear your space. Free your mind.