Furnishing a small apartment: Why compact living doesn't mean less

For over 20 years, we have been helping to design very different homes in Zurich: apartments with beautiful light and difficult corners. Rental apartments with certain boundaries. Family apartments where every room has to serve different purposes. And city apartments in which a table is perhaps also a workplace, dining table and space for board games, crafts and conversations.

The same thought comes up again and again: This is not our forever home. There is often a certain reluctance behind this. Should we really invest in this place? Shouldn't we wait until we have more space, until the children are older, until everything is a little easier at some point?

We understand this feeling very well. At the same time, we have often seen how much changes when a home, no matter how small or temporary, is looked at with care. A small home should never feel like a waiting room for a larger one.

Life doesn't happen later. It takes place now. In the morning light at the kitchen table. In the armchair where you read after work. In the room that has to be a living room, office, guest room and retreat all at the same time. Living compactly doesn't mean settling for less. It means making more of what is already there.

Small does not mean less valuable

In a smaller home, every single piece counts. A table may have to support dinner, work and conversation. A chair can define an entire corner. A lamp can change the mood more than another piece of furniture.

This is where quality becomes very practical. A carefully selected chair, table, sofa, lamp or cabinet doesn't just belong to a particular address. Such pieces can move with you. To another room, another city, another phase of life. And if you live with something well-made for long enough, it takes on meaning. It becomes part of your own history or your family history. Not because it is particularly valuable, but because it was there.

Small does not necessarily mean provisional, cheap or low budget. Some of the most intelligent furniture has been created precisely because spaces were modest and everyday life demanded flexibility. Mogens Koch's modular bookcase system, designed for his own home in 1928 and now produced by Fredericia Furniture, is a fine example of this: quiet, useful and made to grow with life.

Such pieces are often passed on or rediscovered decades later in good vintage and auction houses. Their value remains because they are still useful, beautiful and relevant.

What Japan and the North understand about space

There is a natural connection between Japanese interiors and the more restrained side of Nordic design. Both value simplicity, natural materials, craftsmanship and everyday practicality. This connection is not only visual, but also philosophical.

Japanese homes often had to make do with limited space. Rooms change function throughout the day. Storage space is carefully planned. Empty space is respected. Beauty is created through proportion, material, shadow and restraint.

At its best, the Nordic approach also shares this respect for everyday life. It asks: Is it useful? Is it well made? Does it bring warmth without being loud? Will it still feel right in ten or twenty years' time?