The Cabanon is a fully equipped apartment of 6.89 m² including two infrared saunas and a whirlpool bath. It is organized into four spaces, extravagantly different in materials and heights: a 3 m-high living room, a 1.14 m-high bedroom with plenty of storage, a toilet with a rain-shower, and a spa. The spa is the most enclosed space of the Cabanon: the room within a room.

The Cabanon is probably the smallest apartment in the world; certainly the smallest with a spa.

The Cabanon is the conversion of an existing attic used for storage into a living space. It is located on the top floor of a 1950’s residential building in the centre of Rotterdam. Its inside dimensions are H: 3 m, W: 1,97 m, L: 3,6 m. It has a 6 m² window overlooking the city.

The Cabanon takes its name from the eponymous cabin of Le Corbusier at the Côte d'Azur. Like the Le Corbusier cabin, the Cabanon of Rotterdam has been conceived by the same architects who will use it. It is 6,89 m², half the size of Le Corbusier’s unit and –unlike his Cabanon– fully autonomous and designed for a couple.

The Cabanon is an experiment in space for Beatriz and Bernd -the architects and the owners, who increasingly saw personal growth in voluntary reduction. However, this reduction was never understood as austerity. The Cabanon is of the most luxurious smallness, an “epicurean reduction”.

The Cabanon is a fascinating manifestation of the specific desires of Beatriz and Bernd for their second home. They wanted a small bed to sleep close, and a bench along the window. They didn’t need a large kitchen as they love to eat out during the weekend, but they wanted to have the possibility of cooking nonetheless. They wished to have a rain-shower, two infrared saunas, and a whirlpool bath.  

The Cabanon is a temple in the proportions of its owners who became the modulors of their Cabanon. Beatriz’s and Bernd’s heights are 1,72 m and 1,78 m respectively. The spaces at the Cabanon are dimensioned according to the height and width that they need to perform their functions: When they shower they need a space of 2,13 m in height and a width of 62 cm; when they take a bath or use the saunas they need a height of 1,80 m; and when they sleep or sit on their bed they need a height of 1,14 m and a width of 1.35 m. For the living area they wanted to keep the generous height of 3 meters.

The Cabanon makes clear that different rooms with different sizes and functions might not need the same height. The Cabanon seemed to get bigger the more programs were added to it. The adaptation of heights made that possible.

The four spaces in the Cabanon have been shaped based on standard products: the bedroom was designed with a specific mattress in mind; the spa according to the bathtub length; the kitchen based on the mini-fridge depth, in order to avoid the need of customized objects, but rather the other way around: the Cabanon would adapt to standard and affordable products.

The materials of the Cabanon could have cost four times more had it been realized in its initial colours. The spa was initially conceived in green marble, the shower in white mosaic, the living room in blue cement-tiles. Irresistible offers in building materials caused the spa to be cladded in black Chinese marble from the 80’s, the shower in bleu mosaic, and the living room in coral cement-tiles. Mint green for the bedroom was the only colour voluntarily chosen, and it rather came as a surprise, as mint green would never have been a first choice.

The Cabanon could help optimizing housing and costs but in no way does it advocate towards the reduction of surfaces as the only strategy towards affordable housing, neither it pretends to become the “house of the future”. However, we can extrapolate some of its strategies in order to make current housing production better and cheaper. Some of these are: the optimisation of space–optimisation not understood as ‘reduction’ but as ‘maximisation’ of the possibilities of one space; the modulation of heights of certain spaces in order to superpose some functions; and the detachment towards possession and consumerism, so we are less inclined to buy and accumulate useless objects that clutter our houses (and minds).

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This project was conceived by STAR and BOARD shortly after completing their large research project in 2012 into the “maximization of space” by sharing, on their project “Co-Residence” for the AIGP (Atelier International du Grand Paris). For the Cabanon, STAR and BOARD, took an opposite path and experimented on reduction. 

This project was developed while STAR was designing Ilot-3H in Grand Paris, a large housing complex of 288 experimental apartments.