There are some apartment details that you can easily decorate around — think: an unusable fireplace hidden by a cleverly placed furniture piece. And then there are those problems that seem impossible to fix. The keyword being seem.
When interior decorator Amanda Heald and her husband, Josh Hull, began leasing a 300-square-foot Brooklyn apartment that needed to work for them and their child, they quickly realized one major challenge — and it wasn’t just the rental’s small footprint. There was a lack of natural light in the sleeping area; the bedroom’s only window actually looked out onto the living room. The bedroom felt dark and dreary until the couple came up with a clever idea that would also maximize space: lofting their bed.
Lofting the Bed Allowed for Natural Light
Amanda and Josh didn’t just buy a bunk bed and a ladder. Instead, because of the apartment’s high ceilings, there was room for them to DIY build a two-tiered arrangement with stairs leading to a bed platform.
Rather than being in a dark room with a bed taking up most of the room’s square footage, the bed is now elevated to be parallel to a window overlooking the living room. (The stair and platform arrangement is similar to what another Brooklyn renter created in a comparably small studio apartment.)
“I don’t know how the tenants before us were able to manage in this 80-square-foot bedroom — the minimum square footage a bedroom can legally be in NYC — without building upwards because that was the only way we could make the space work for us,” Amanda said at the time of the House Tour.
Lofting the Bed Turned a 1-Bedroom into a 2-Bedroom
Another unexpected benefit came out of lofting the bed: it created space for another bedroom. Underneath the lofted bed was their child’s nursery, which was big enough for a crib and featured an unused fireplace that was converted into storage.
This was never meant to be a long-term solution for the couple and their baby (some commenters on the original House Tour were understandably concerned about what would happen once the baby started crawling and walking). The couple later shared a tour of their next home, which was larger but just as creative and located in Kansas City.
What makes this home so memorable is how thoroughly they customized a rental for their own needs without permanently altering the space. Though this kind of project should only be undertaken by people with the skills and knowledge to construct something safely, it’s a reminder that our homes can, with creativity, be adapted far more than we might expect.
“Everything that has been done can and will be undone,” Amanda noted at the time of the original House Tour. “It’s not wasted money or effort because it has brought us a great amount of joy and has now granted us the opportunity to be featured on an enormous lifestyle blog. However, the amount of money we spent doing everything ourselves with mostly second-hand supplies is not even close to the amount we’d need for a down payment on a house.”
