The New York Times on TreeHugger Founder’s Tiny Apartment and Its “Convertible Tricks”


LifeEdited/CC BY 2.0

Since 2010, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill has been rethinking how much we really need to live, and trimming down all his needs into one tiny, hyper-functional, changeable space. He calls it LifeEdited.

The goal? Live with less stuff but more flexibility, comfort, and happiness in his 420-square-foot Sullivan Street apartment on New York’s SoHo. And the day of completion is upon us: Graham moved in last weekend, and for the first time — as a permanent resident that is — swung down his Murphy bed, ate at his expandable table, and slid back his movable wall.

Naturally The New York Times noticed all this activity, and has a three-page spread as well as a slideshow on the occasion. They sum things up here:

IT may be that the house of the future is an apartment — at 420 square feet, a very small apartment — in a century-old tenement building on Sullivan Street. Shiny and white, it has movable walls that allow it to morph from one room into six, as well as expandable furniture and filtered, or “country,” air, as the owner, Graham Hill, put it recently while showing off the apartment’s convertible tricks like a modern-day Bernadette Castro, dressed neatly in a black merino wool polo shirt, black pants and black Vans.

As Graham envisions his snug apartment as a working laboratory for living with less, the move-in is only the first step in taking his idea global.

Graham’s next LifeEdited project will be large-scale, and what better place to go large than Las Vegas? Part of a corporate campus including residential living for retailer Zappos, the proposed LifeEdited apartment building will be a collaboration beween Graham; Romanian architecture student Catalin Sandu (one of the two winners of the LifeEdited design competition that also honored Adrian Iancu) ; and architecture firm Guerin Glass.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Hill’s group has proposed apartment buildings designed around large, open courtyards with units ranging from 300 to 600 square feet. It is quite something to promote studio-apartment living in a state that has so much housing stock available at such a steep discount. (Nevada still leads the country in foreclosures.)

What do we mean by hyper-functionible? This video offers a glimpse.

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