Apartment Look

Six years ago, Mike Brown and Casey Lynch stood on Downtown Boise ’s 8th Street and wondered: Why don’t more people live here? Downtown seemed to have everything that a growing percentage of Americans wanted in a place to live. “I mean, there’s all kinds of jobs. There’s a million coffee shops and hair salons and restaurants, and there’s an active street life ,” says Brown, who founded the Los Angeles- based development company LocalConstruct with Lynch in 2008. Casey Lynch, left, and Mike Brown have made their mark in Boise. Provided by LocalConstruct But in 2011, fewer than 4,000 people lived in Downtown’s scattered apartment and condominium buildings and houses. On a typical weekday afternoon , most Downtown workers got in their cars and put the city in the rearview mirror. Brown and Lynch saw an opportunity. They thought Boiseans would trade ample floor space and vaulted ceilings in the suburbs for smaller, high- end Downtown apartments that offered amenities like gyms, a do...

A universally acknowledged truth about living in New York City is that there's very little space to go around. What passes for an entire apartment in Manhattan is considered a walk-in closet in Des Moines. This dearth of square footage has resulted in a couple notable phenomenons : Namely, pocket-emptying rents and some—let's just call it—creative uses of space. I recently glimpsed one particularly unusual vision of our inevitable micro-living future. Twenty floors up in a luxury midtown Manhattan studio apartment , a hulking piece of furniture sat pressed against the wall. From the front it looked like an entertainment console with built in shelving. From the side, it appeared to be a regular bookshelf, save for a small button. At nine feet tall, five feet wide and seven feet long, the thing took up nearly a fourth of the apartment's main living area , leaving just enough space for what could either be a livingroom or bedroom, but definitely not both. "This is Ori,...