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.

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.

Clear your space. Free your mind.