Condo Blues: Tiny Mall Micro Loft House Tour

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Tiny Mall Micro Loft House Tour

Tiny houses are all the rage, so it should be no surprise that city dwellers can live cute and with a ridiculously small carbon footprint in tiny micro apartments – in a converted historic shopping mall!



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You don’t have to be a shopaholic to live here. In fact, given that the average size of each tiny apartment is 220 square feet it is probably best if you aren’t.





 The sofa converts into a murphy bed for overnight guests!

The Arcade was built in 1828 in Providence, Rhode Island and is American’s first indoor shopping mall. Unfortunately, while many of the shops did well on the first floor, the lack of an elevator made doing business on the second and third floors difficult.

Time and retail trends caught up with the historic landmark and it closed until The Arcade Providence bought the building and saved it with the innovative approach of converting the mall shops on the second and third floors into living space and being super selective about the stores allowed to rent the first floor retail space. Which I can only describe as funky Etsy shops come to brick and mortar store life.
 
Look at all of the light the glass ceiling provides in the atrium. Solar energy at its finest!

The owner really did their design and space planning homework when creating this converted loft apartment building.  The placement and use of built ins that come with each apartment were inspired by those used on boats and it shows.


The bedroom area. In this tiny apartment the sofa on the right converts into a guest bed.

I am utterly jealous because there is way more storage space with drawers under the bed and sofas and double duty furniture than I had when I rented a much larger efficiency apartment back in the day.

They also get a separate storage space, bike entrance and storage.  I didn’t have that either!


If residents feel like the walls are closing in there is common room with a kitchenette, TV, washers and dryers and free Wi-Fi which sounds like a fantastic way to get to know your tiny living neighbors!

A typical tiny loft floor plan with a surprising amount of natural light.

The only downside, is to keep the apartment size so micro tiny (and ensure they make enough money in rents to keep the building open,) the owner had to follow rooming house building codes which means the tiny apartments have an almost full size refrigerator, microwave oven, an adorable dollhouse size dishwasher, but no real kitchen.

 The coffee table converts to desk/dining table height. How cool is that?


Which could be a deal breaker if you love to cook unless you want to go the hot plate and toaster oven route (aff,) which weirdly is allowed.

Could you live here?

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