World’s narrowest house by Jakub Szczesny

When some arbitrary floor is having an impact you'de expect it to be felt. A lot of people have had a minimum wage job for example. Most are aware of it. Few people even know about minimum home sizes.

I have a large-ish house. But it feels cramped very quickly when it's messy. There's a vast number of things to do that gives the feeling of space with less.

For example, in my case, one thing I've started working on is digitizing as much as I can of my life so I can put my dvd's and books in boxes and clear the walls and surfaces, for example. I realize that there's very few physical objects in my house I actually need, and I've started systematically working to pare it down.

But other factors makes a big difference too, such as simply keeping surfaces bare and everything tidy... More and more of our stuff goes in boxes and drawers - the space taken by extra storage is paid back many times over in the feeling of extra space from less clutter...

It's interesting you mention electonics projects, since one of the things I had in the back of my mind is doing wood- and metalworking, which tends to require their own spaces, which can be hard to come by (and expensive). One can either have a dedicated space and proper tools (table saw, drill press, metal brake, welder etc.) or then one can do small things in one's own apartment. To make it cheaper to have a dedicated space it could be made multi-user, shared by many people, but then one loses the benefit of storing the "state" of ones project, just by leaving everything where it was. Cleaning up at the end of each session can be a big fixed cost for larger projects.

Yes, exactly, my post was clearly very unclear. I was not trying to say "this is how we all live in the future", but rather, "how might we enable nice living in smaller apartments".

So I was trying to get at why one wants a big place. So why is this so, and is this the only mode of operating. Business usually rents space rather than owns it, but it was not always so. I'm wondering if one could make the own/rent equation more fine-grained. I'm thinking of some kind of personalized space rental. Like you store your data in the cloud, you could similarly store some of your stuff in the cloud, and only call it in when you actually need it.

Currently it is not too uncommon for people to collaboratively consume (e.g. borrow/rent over the Internet) rarely used tools, such as hedge clippers or lawn mowers. It does not make sense to do it for things one uses frequently (e.g. spoons), but it might make sense for other things. I've come to realize that I don't really need my living room on a daily basis, only for parties, and for that it is way too small. Now I don't want a restaurant for our mostly small children's parties, but could I somehow avoid owning the living room? If there was a space nearby that I could rent, that would not work, since the kitchen fittings, appliances etc. would not fit my needs or taste. It is currently infeasible to personalize the space for each tenant, but it is still interesting to consider. What if I had a storage space of stuff I owned (perhaps collectively with other people), that I could call on demand. When organizing the dinner party, the stored kitchen stuff would be retrieved from the storage (which could be at several physical locations), and delivered to the space. The organizing and moving costs are what makes it infeasible. The organizing cost could be removed with clever software, the moving cost, not so much.

From the article:

    “It requires a sense of humour, as you cannot stay long in a place like this,” 
    joked Szczesny.

What I like about this is that both the house in TFA and this one are 'leftover space' re-used by someone that figured it's wasteful. It's a pity the house from the article can't be legally occupied, I'm sure it would be an interesting experience to live in a space like that for a while.

Hide-and-seek would be quite boring though!

As for why facades are so narrow in Amsterdam, if people wonder (there are many more below 3 meters). It is because people used to have to pay property taxes based on the width of the facade of their house.

(so the owners of the house in the article got a good deal by being able to have a small facade for a wider house)

Maybe (not letting depth run wild either) something similar could be an interesting way to ensure walkable cities ;-)