Problems of rooftop living in Paris. Delivering a couch.
A Paris landlord was recently prosecuted for trying to rent an apartment of five square metres. That’s fifty-three square feet, or, roughly, seven feet by seven. (By way of comparison, the American Correctional Association requires prison cells to be at least seventy square feet – about nine by eight.) The legal limit for an apartment here is nine square metres: still not what one would call spacious, but at least there would be foot room once you got out of bed, so you wouldn’t be reduced, like Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, to standing in the shower to work.
But if you are looking for someone to lament the smallness of apartments, you have come to the wrong person. Writing dislikes large spaces. Was anything of note ever written in the open air? Ideas grow in solitude and seclusion. “I could be bounded in a nut shell,” said Hamlet, “and count myself a king of infinite space.” Thoughts need to rebound from the walls, making their way back into one’s consciousness just as you think they’ve gone for good. (Is this why so many books are written in prison?)
It's only recently that living in an apartment the size of the average American walk-in closet has come to seem unreasonable. When Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 1860s, the six-storey buildings which lined his boulevards came with a clutch of tiny rooms under the roof known as chambres de bonnes - maids’ rooms. Each accommodated a single bed, a side table, and shelves for clothes and personal possessions. In them lived the ten or twelve men and women who cooked, cleaned, shopped, fetched and carried for the five or six families below.
To make our apartment, they knocked together all the building’s chambres de bonnes. This took at least a century, and only concluded in 1939, when the last two apartments were consolidated into one. My office was one room, our bedroom two, while four made up the salon - dining and sitting room combined. The bathroom required two more, but when it came to moving the shared toilet from the landing, the plumbers admitted defeat. It remains, to the confusion of visitors, by our front door.
Such compromises are part of daily life in Paris. Add-on bathrooms and kitchens encrust the upper levels of many inner city buildings, tributes to the ingenuity of jobbing builders and plumbers. Most owners never bothered to inform the council of the changes, particularly since they might not applaud their efforts but order the additions demolished. Fortunately, the authorities are mainly concerned with the part on public view. In architecture as in life, what happens behind the façade is none of their business.
Taxes are based on the square footage of your property, another reason not to mention any repurposing. Such calculations can involve some Byzantine arithmetic. A long balcony runs across the front of our apartment on the street side. It was bare when we moved in, but we’ve made it a garden and, in summer, an extension of the salon. Officially, however, it’s still a balcony, and not, for tax purposes, a room. A friend recently tried to instal an elevator in his building, sharing the cost with a neighbour according to the area of their apartments. The neighbour lived in a duplex, with a bedroom cantilevered out over the salon - which, he claimed, didn’t count as floor area. They are still wrangling, but my friend is getting used to the stairs.
A joke circulated that, in a nightmare world, policemen would be German, car mechanics French and cooks and lovers English, while in Utopia the policemen would be English, the car mechanics German and the cooks and lovers French. In that case, the architects, particularly in Paris, should be Japanese. Anyone who has ever shoehorned themselves into a Japanese shower or sat on its toilet with one’s knees under the counter and a wall hugging one’s arm will know the sense that one isn’t so much using the room as wearing it.
Not that I’m complaining. I was never so content in any space as in one which took that compression to its logical conclusion. For a few days, I lived in a ryokan – a traditional Japanese inn - in Kyoto. Its measured ways soon became mine: the futon stowed away each morning to create a living room; the table pushed aside after breakfast to make a study, the shoji sliding shut each time with that satisfying shhhclick. Space… and time… to read, to write, to think. In five square metres…? Not even that much.
I love your apartment !!!