I remember the day I moved into my first apartment. It was a 42 square meter box with a kitchen that doubled as a hallway and a living room that needed to be a dining room, a workspace, and a bedroom for guests. The walls were white, the floors were gray laminate, and the radiator clicked all night. The immediate problem wasn't the size. It was that I had no idea how to fit a real bed, a couch, and a table into one room without making it look like a storage unit. The biggest hurdle for any apartment interior design is that you are not designing for a magazine spread. You are designing for sleep, work, eating, and hosting your mom when she visits. That means every piece of furniture has to pull double duty, and you have to be ruthless about what stays.

My first fix was the sleeping situation. A standard bed takes up roughly four square meters of floor space, and in a small apartment, that is a luxury you cannot afford if you also want to sit down. So I got a sofa bed.