An oddly-shaped Paris apartment was seemingly a lost cause. It was very tall, impossibly narrow and had no natural light other than some skylights in the ceiling. Clemence Eliard and Marc Sirvin, architects at Agence SML, tackled the challenge and created a cozy four-level home.

According to the architects, the owner of the property acquired different parts of the residence over a number of years, which accounts for the unusual shape of the apartment.

The plan for the apartment centered around turning it into a tower. Each level has its own specific function. The basement holds the bathroom, the second/main level houses the kitchen and living area, the third floor is home to a home office, and the bedroom is in a cozy little loft on the fourth level.

To keep the tower apartment from feeling dark and cramped, the materials are light and airy. The office floor is made of a metal grid to allow light from the skylights to flow throughout the space.

Alternating stairs keep the staircase footprint small, leaving more room for the home’s essential functions on each level. With only 269 square feet (25 square meters) with which to work, creative solutions like this one were important for maintaining the home’s functionality.

The bedroom at the very top of the apartment  is a comfortable nest that takes up nearly the entire loft space. A skylight is situated directly over the bed, providing a gentle natural alarm clock and a comfortable hideaway to unwind after a long day.

From Archdaily:


“The architects envisioned the space as a tower in which each level would have its proper function: the bathroom in the basement, the kitchen-living-room at ground level, the home-office and dressing-room on the 1st floor and the bedroom higher up on the 2nd floor. These functions being all linked together by alternating tread stairs, daylight coming through a full height void. The ground floor, located in the back of a courtyard and previously lit in second day, would thus become an illuminated space thanks to the skylights.”