Name: NEVER TOO SMALL 23sqm/247sqft Micro Apartment - The Cairo Flat
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T21:36:47.000Z
Duration: 5 min 17 s
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The Cairo Flats were designed in 1936 by a Melbourne architect called Best Overend.

He'd been working in the UK with an English architect called Wells Coates and they were developing quite experimental ideas for how to provide the maximum amenity in the minimum footprint, and they called this idea the Minimum Flat.

The Cairo Flats are listed on the Heritage Register as being historically significant.

One of the first examples of serially arranged flats, so side by side and stacked on top of one another, also for their so-called heroic use of cantilevered concrete in the balconies and the spiral staircase.

As soon as you walk in the door, you're greeted with an expanse of view onto the garden.

The apartment does a number of things quite well.

Firstly, they're north-facing, so they're getting a lot of great natural light.

But even though they're quite small, they do a couple of things that make them feel much bigger.

Firstly, the really high 2.9 metre ceiling.

When you look into the detail of the place, there's that cove junction between the walls and the ceiling.

The sense of space is extended by not registering that hard line.

So when I moved in, there was very little storage.

I wanted to really respect the bones of this building because it was really well designed.

I made a few minor modifications to the space.

Bookshelves, wardrobe, bed, extra objects stuck in the room, they're all integrated into the wall.

So the curtain's definitely a bit of a theatrical element.

I can use it to cover up all of my clothes and books and personal bits and pieces and make it a bit more of a living space rather than a bedroom.

I guess when you're designing a small space, you want to make sure that everything needs to be performing at least one, if not two or three functions.

The footrest that makes sitting in the corner and reading comfortable is a bit of a challenge becomes something that I can stand on to reach higher storage elements.

This window used to be the kitchen door, which meant that you couldn't actually put anything up against that wall.

Closing that in and turning it into a servery window meant that I can now fold the bed down into that position.

And it's also a great spot to have my bedside table, books, glass of water.

At night time, I pull the curtain back, the bed folds down, and it comes all the way around to the front window and closes the room in, makes it a nice, cosy space to sleep.

The kitchen was renovated in around about 2000 by someone who lived here before me and hasn't been modified since.

Because the bathroom's so large, it kind of makes for the perfect space to have your laundry as well.

The original apartment always had a bathtub, still has a bathtub, and I was definitely keen on keeping that bathtub.

It's a little bit of luxury in such a small space.

The challenge of living in a space this small is designing it in ways so that you can enjoy all of the things that a normal house would have.

Somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to study.

If I have friends over for dinner, I take my desk, which doubles as my dining table, I pull it out into the middle of the room, bring a couple of the outside chairs in, and then I've got a dining setting.

You've got windows on both sides of the apartment, so you get really excellent cross-ventilation.

Melbourne hit five million last year, heading for something like eight million by 2050.

We need to be thinking about how we're going to house people more space-efficiently.

I think when you've got a really well-built building like the Cairo Flats, the last thing you want to be doing, apart from its historical value, is knocking it down because it's providing another kind of housing which doesn't really exist elsewhere, which really suits a certain kind of resident at a certain time in their lives.

Environmentally irresponsible to be just knocking buildings down and building new all the time.

We need to be thinking about how we can repurpose what we've already got.