A 300-Square-Foot Apartment Is Made Over on a Student Budget

For her first real estate purchase, the young owner of this compact, 300-square-foot apartment wanted all the amenities of a true home. “This isn’t a basic flat for a student,” explains Aliénor Louédin, the architect hired for this project in Paris’s Pigalle neighborhood. “My client entertains and hosts dinners. She needed a true adult apartment.” The first issue was the size. The second challenge was a two-foot-thick load-bearing wall that was impossible to knock down. Finally, the budget was especially tight. These constraints didn’t faze Aliénor Louédin, founding architect of Inaugure Studio, who took this small space housed in a 19th-century building and transformed it into a charming and functional interior.

Before the renovation, the apartment was divided into two square rooms, with a large kitchen with a central island. “With so little room to work with, we couldn’t afford to waste so much space,” Louédin says. On the other side of the central load-bearing wall, there was a bedroom with a bathroom. She describes it as “a sort of square within a rectangle. Each room felt like it was squeezed into a corner.” To optimize space, Louédin opted to put the lounge-bedroom area into the larger of the two spaces (measuring 172 square feet) and the kitchen and bathroom in the smaller one (129 square feet).

The dining-kitchen area is on the opposite side of the load-bearing wall.

A load-bearing wall divides the apartment while still leaving a small passageway between the two rooms.

The kitchen is located in the smaller of the apartment’s two spaces.

To get around the limitations created by the load-bearing wall, Louédin decided to turn it into a feature of the design. “I articulated the entire project around this wall and unfolded it like fabric, starting with the small shelves in the kitchen and then wrapping around the wall to reach the lounge-bedroom, using a series of panels. It has a sort of pleated effect that softens the imposing feel of the wall.” Similarly, Louédin drew inspiration from the bathroom’s half-arch, reproducing it over and over again and creating niches based on the same shape. “I repeated this shape because I needed to soften the angles of the apartment, which was compartmentalized and obtuse. It also made the passage through the thick wall more fluid.”