This Tiny Basement Home in Athens Supports Multi-Generational Living
This tiny home in Athens, Greece, is a magnificent example of both urban and multi-generational family living.
Built in 1980 in a quiet neighborhood near the beach, this basement storage space is now an open-plan apartment, with grandparents, parents, and grandchildren occupying different stories of the building structure.
Multi-generational living has its perks. For example, there is no washer or dryer in the apartment because the residents use the parents’ washer and dryer one flight up.
The Athens micro apartment was designed to create a feeling of density and fullness with many different types of textures, spaces, and furnishings, rather than the minimalist sense of space that is usually prevalent in tiny home design. This layout was inspired by a traditional Greek house, which has a “density of things and atmospheres”.
In this video, the architects walk you through their design:
The apartment has a cave-like feeling because it only gets light on one side. The architects wanted to work with that and emphasize the cave-like qualities. They used warm, earthy materials, many of which were recycled from shops and old factories.
The space was left open plan with furniture used to delineate the dining, living, and sleeping areas. Their main structural change was extending the bathroom in order to fit in a shower.
When you first walk into the home, there is a foyer with a divider inspired by Japanese design and full of plants, which feels like a garden but also creates privacy between the apartment and outside world.
The interplay between private and communal space is also found in the bedroom, which can be left open during the day but closed off by steel dividers and curtains at night to maintain privacy.
Athens tiny home
The architects of this Athens tiny home hope that it provides an example of housing more people in cities by using unconventional spaces, like storage units, while also creating traditional homes that keep multigenerational families together.
For more micro apartment tours, discover this loft conversion in Amsterdam or this tiny Paris apartment in the Haute Marais.
To see more videos, check out the NEVER TOO SMALL YouTube channel.
Comments
Join the conversation
I don't see any handrails.