Small apartments and studios
One room that has to be a house. How the tradition divides a small space by use and by light, the screen it used to do it, where the bed goes when there is no bedroom, the clearances a studio needs between its things, what to do with the kitchen in the living room, and what the tradition’s own smallest flats, in Hong Kong, make of the rules.
Oriented NE 048°
Earth
The tradition’s rules were written for houses with rooms, and a studio has one. The rules do not stop applying; they apply in sequence across a single floor, from the door to the bed, and the room is read as the whole house in one span. Most of what a studio needs is an order, and the tradition has one; the rest is a screen, which the tradition also has, and a tape measure, which it borrows.
One room, in order
The gradient that runs through a house from the yang entrance to the yin bedroom runs through a studio from the door to the far wall. Arrive first: a mat, a hook, a surface for keys, a place to stand that is not already the living room, the ming tang inside the door in its smallest form. Then the kitchen, on the wall nearest the door, where the tradition puts Fire and activity. Then the table, where the light from the window reaches it. Then the seats. Then, at the far end, out of the door’s line and behind something, the bed. The bedroom page draws the same gradient through a whole flat; a studio is that flat with the walls taken out and the order left in.
The screen
The tradition divided rooms before it had walls to spare, and the thing it divided them with is still the best answer to a studio. The Chinese screen, pingfeng, came in two kinds: the folding screen of six or eight leaves, lacquered or painted, that stood on the floor and could be moved by one person, and the single standing panel on a base, set a pace inside a door to stop the line through it, the indoor form of the spirit screen the front door guide describes. Clunas’s study of Ming taste records screens among the most valued things a household owned, listed in inventories before beds, and the reason was not only the painting on them: a screen made a room out of a hall, a bedroom out of a room, a study out of a corner, and it could be moved when the use changed. A curtain on a track is the same object with the leaves taken out; a bookcase set across the room is the same object filled with books, and the tradition reads all three as the wall the plan did not give.
The bed
Everything in the bed placement guide holds inside the alcove: head to the solid wall, the door in view, out of the door’s line, nothing over it. The studio adds the far end of the room as a fourth condition, because the far end is the only place that can be yin. A bed beside the door, or under the window, or across the middle, is a bed with the whole flat passing through it. A sofa-bed is accepted by the tradition where nothing else fits and disliked where something does, on the reasoning that a bed which becomes a sofa keeps rest and company in one place; the practical reading is that a bed unfolded every night is a bed slept in badly, and a bed that is always a bed, behind a curtain, costs a square metre and a half of floor and gives back every night.
The clearances
The tradition asks for open floor and a route through the room, and a studio has to know how much floor a route needs. The designers’ minimums, from Panero and Zelnik’s handbook, are the ones the drawing dimensions: ninety centimetres for the main route, so that a person carrying something passes without turning; sixty beside a bed and behind a pulled-out chair, the least a person walks through sideways; seventy-five between a table and whatever stands behind its chairs, so that a chair can be pulled out and sat in; a hundred and twenty in front of a kitchen worktop, so that a cupboard opens with someone standing at it; and the door’s swing kept clear, a mat and nothing else in it. Add them up across seven metres and the room has room for one route, one bed, one table and one run of kitchen, which is what a studio is, and the point of the drawing is that the route comes first and the furniture fits round it, not the other way about.
The kitchen in the room
The tradition’s kitchen rules survive the loss of the kitchen. Fire and Water, the stove and the sink, a little apart; the stove not in the line of the front door; the cook not with their back to the room. A studio adds one more: the stove should not face the bed, so that the two ends of the room, Fire and rest, do not look at each other. A counter that turns the cook toward the room rather than the wall satisfies most of it, and an extractor that works satisfies the part the tradition does not mention; a studio that smells of last night’s dinner at breakfast is a studio in which the kitchen has reached the bed, which is the tradition’s objection in the nose.
Light and storage
The single window makes the yang end, and the desk or the table takes it. The wall opposite the window makes the yin end, and the bed takes that. Between them the room needs its floor: the tradition’s demand for open floor is a demand for somewhere to be, and in a small room it is met by putting storage up the walls, to the ceiling if possible, rather than across the floor in chests and low units. A studio that is all floor and tall shelves feels like a room; the same studio with the same objects in low furniture feels like a corridor. The clutter guide draws the heights at which things live.
Cut through, the studio is the section above: the window at one end and the desk under it, the bed at the other end against the wall, and between them a floor that stays a floor because the storage has gone up the wall instead of across it. The ghosted chests are what most studios do instead, and what makes them feel smaller than they are: a floor broken into paths between low things is a floor the eye cannot read as one room. The tradition’s reading is about qi that cannot move; the tenant’s is about a room that cannot be crossed.
Mirrors and the long room
Many studios are long and narrow, and the classical remedy for a narrow room is a mirror on one of the long side walls, which the tradition reads as widening it and the eye reads the same way. The rules for the mirror are the ones in the mirror guide: not facing the bed, not facing the door, not opposite another mirror, and large enough to show a whole person. One good mirror on the long wall does more for a studio than a row of small ones, which the tradition reads as fragmenting the room and the eye reads as clutter.
Checklist
- A place to arrive inside the door, not the bed in view of it; the door’s swing kept clear
- Kitchen on the wall nearest the door; stove not facing the bed; a metre twenty in front of the worktop
- Table and desk at the window end, in the light, with room to pull a chair
- Bed at the far end, head to the wall, door in view, behind a curtain or screen, a passage beside it
- One route, ninety wide, from the door to the window, through nothing
- Storage up the walls, floor kept open
- One mirror on the long wall, not facing bed or door
- Nothing over the bed; the sofa with its back to a wall