We love tiny housing — it’s less wasteful, and so adorable! But there’s a limit to how small a space you can live in and still not go insane. We butted up against it with the 78-square-foot apartment, but this video about a (fictional, but plausible) Hong Kong apartment called King’s Cube plunges past the way-too-tiny event horizon. The room in the video is 16 square feet, just big enough for a smallish bed.
King’s Cube is the creation of MFA student Joe Yiu, who wanted to investigate the Hong Kong idea of an “ideal living space.” The apartment advertised in her video features art, houseplants, wood flooring, and “international-class marble” — at least, the model unit does — and residents dress in formalwear to show their status, but the space is too small for a kitchen, a bathroom, a dresser, a chair, or a particularly tall or wide human. If you try to swing a cat in here, you’d better be prepared for a lot of cleanup.
This isn’t too far off reality for some in Hong Kong, where the poor live in “cubicle apartments” just like the one shown in the video, only not as nice. (King’s Cube is set in a real cubicle apartment unit, dressed up for the film.) Though the video is satire, the only real fiction is the idea that a 16-square-foot dwelling would be a status symbol. But as tiny housing gets more expensive — remember the $400,000 tiny apartment? — that starts to look not so far-fetched after all.
