The Cabanon - the biggest smallest apartment in the world

The Cabanon is a fully equipped apartment of 6.89m² including an infrared sauna and a whirlpool bath. It hosts four rooms and it is most likely the smallest apartment in the world; certainly the smallest with a spa.

The inside dimensions of the Cabanon are H: 3 m, W: 1,97m, L: 3,6m. It has a 6m² window overlooking the city. It is organized into four spaces extravagantly different in materials and heights: a 3m-high living room with kitchen, a 1.14m-high bedroom with plenty of storage, a toilet with a rain-shower, and a spa.

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 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. 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 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: Beatriz and Bernd. 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 a temple in the proportions of its owners who became the modulors of their Cabanon. It is an experiment in space for Beatriz and Bernd 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 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.

Architecture: STAR strategies + architecture in collaboration with BOARD (Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design)
Lead Architects: Beatriz Ramo (STAR) and Bernd Upmeyer (BOARD)
Team STAR: Beatriz Ramo with Geoffrey Clamour; Images: Efraín Pérez del Barrio, Ivan Guerrero Jiménez
Team BOARD: Bernd Upmeyer
Construction: Midwinter - Timmerwerk & Decoratie (Arjen van Caspel and Mirjam Groenendijk)
Models-Dancers: Guido Dutilh and Boston Gallacher