A 74-square-foot apartment design in Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second-largest city, has captured attention for its innovative use of space, as featured on Archinect.

The Cabanon, as its architect-owners Beatriz Ramo and Bernd Upmeyer prefer to call it, takes the 1951 vacation retreat Le Corbusier designed for himself in the Côte d'Azur as inspiration and includes a living room, sleeping pod, and tiny bathroom component with a small toilet, rain-shower, and spa. 

Each of these spaces comes color-coded, an effect that counteracts the apparent cramping quality of the space. A series of built-ins are another pivotal inclusion, affording them space to store items for their guests behind a tangerine-colored wall. 

Ramo and Upmeyer acquired the upper floor residual space in the upper portion of their post-war apartment building in 2013. Upmeyer is the founder of BOARD (Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design), while Ramo runs the show at STAR strategies + architecture. Together, they say this is simultaneously an "epicurean reduction" and "temple" to their mid-size proportions (about 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10, respectively). The modulators calculated very specific ceiling heights tailored to the use of different areas. The resulting dimensions are 43 square feet for the sleeping pod, 39 square feet for the living space, and 23 square feet for the bathroom (not including the 12 square foot shower).

Speaking of the potential lesson to be gleaned from their innovation, the architects explain: "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."

This claim to the "smallest apartment in the world" was created around the same time Ramo was designing the Ilot-3H in Paris, a large housing complex with 288 experimental apartments.