At only 6.89 square metres, the Cabanon is a fully equipped apartment, including an infrared sauna and a whirlpool bath. It is most likely the smallest apartment in the world – certainly the smallest with a spa. But somehow, it hosts four rooms!
A former attic, used for storage and located on the top floor of a 1950s residential building in the centre of Rotterdam, it was converted into a living space – only three metres high, and almost two metres wide, with a six-square-metre window overlooking the city.
The Cabanon takes its name from the eponymous cabin of Le Corbusier at the Côte d’Azur. Like the Le Corbusier cabin, it has been conceived by the same architects who will use it. Half the size of Le Corbusier’s unit, it is, however, fully autonomous and carefully designed for a couple.
The Cabanon was conceived by STAR strategies + architecture, a firm based in Rotterdam and founded by Spanish architect and urbanist Beatriz Ramo www.instagram.com/star_strategies_architecture/ and BOARD (Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design), another Rotterdam firm, founded by Bernd Upmeyer http://b-o-a-r-d.nl/
It is an experiment in space for Beatriz and Bernd (B and B) – the architects and owners, who increasingly saw “personal growth in voluntary reduction”, which was never understood as austerity.
“The Cabanon is of the most luxurious smallness, an epicurean reduction,” they maintain.
A fascinating manifestation of the specific desires of B and B for their second home, it includes a small bed to sleep close, and a bench along the window. They did not need a large kitchen as they love to eat out at the weekend, but they wanted to have the possibility of cooking, nonetheless. And they wished to have a rain-shower, two infrared saunas and a whirlpool bath.
The Cabanon is organised into four autonomous spaces, “extravagantly” different in materials and heights: a three-metre-high living room with kitchen, a 1.14-metre-high bedroom with plenty of storage, a toilet with a rain-shower, and a spa, effectively the room within a room.
It is described as a “temple in the proportions of its owners”.The spaces are, in fact, dimensioned according to the height and width B and B need to perform their functions: when they shower, they need a space of 2.13 metres in height and a width of 62cm; when they take a bath or use the saunas, they need a height of 1.80 metres; and when they sleep or sit on their bed they need a height of 1.14 metres and a width of 1.35 metres.
The project shows that different rooms with different sizes and functions might not need the same height. This could be a model for optimising housing and costs, although it does not follow housing space regulations and is based on logic.
The four spaces in the Cabanon have also been shaped based on standard products, from a specific mattress to the mini-fridge depth, to avoid the need of customised objects and adapt to affordable products. Its execution was also organised around these: the bathtub had to be placed before building the walls around it.
Normally four major constraints shape the design of a project: regulations, time, budget and space, the architects said. But the Cabanon project was free from two of these: regulations and time. Only budget and space were limited; however, the limitation of space was a wish, rather than a constraint, and the Cabanon is proof that limited budget and limited space – with enough time – are not necessarily limitations at all.