This is Katie's tiny kitchen in Berlin, Germany. Her entire apartment is 480 square feet; the kitchen is only 36. The apartment's previous residents had kept their fridge in the living room with dishes stacked on top of it! Katie and her husband Martin did all of the work themselves. They had just moved to Germany and didn't even know where to get tools or construction supplies. But with careful planning, they were able to achieve their dream kitchen. They depended on creative solutions to get the most out of the tiny space.
Katie chronicles her DIY adventures on her blog, Making This Home, which has many, many more kitchen photos!
Katie's List: "How The Heck We Fit It All In There"
- Our cabinets extend all the way to the ceiling, utilizing every inch of vertical space.
- Our oven is too small to cook a turkey, which is fine with us. (We’re vegetarians) It also happens to be our microwave, too.
- We picked a two-burner stove. It turns out we hardly ever use three burners, let alone four.
- Our dishwasher is half-sized. It really feels like just the right size for a family of two.
- Our fridge is a standard German fridge… which happens to be the same tiny size Americans have in college dorms. It’s covered by wooden panels, which is traditional in German kitchens.
- Our recycling system is super compact… and still manages to provide us with a way to sort our recycling in TEN ways (required by German law).
Katie said, "We like to think that good living can come in any size." We here, at Apartment Therapy, fervently agree with her!
Thanks for sharing, Katie!
Via: Tiny House Blog.
Small Cool Lessons: Discovering Small Space Design Ideas That Really Work
Beatriz's Fun & Functional Workspace
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Sheex Bedding
How to Cook Rice on the Stove
How to Make Fresh Pasta Dough in the Food Processor
did we see this recently on AT or did i see it on another blog?
either way, i love it and think they did a terrific job!
That's 36 sq ft of perfection!
awesome! good call on knocking down the wall to make more counter space. i totally agree with the smaller appliances. europeans know what we americans are just starting to realize...less is more!
This is cute! But as a person living alone, I manage to fill up a full-size dishwasher on a regular basis.
How do Europeans have time to go food shopping every day?
Beautiful job, I love open spaces!
But you surely are not renting this apt. and allowed to do all this work?
My dream fridge.
I like the color/choice of wood for your cabinets. They are beautiful.
This is the coolest tiny kitchen ever! The wood is beautiful.
I'm really impressed by how much counter space you carved out of that area. I think it would be sufficient for most everyday cooking.
And you even have a display area for your pretty green dishes. So many nice details...
Great job!
"sort our recycling in TEN ways (required by German law)."
Wait, what? My Hamburg apartment doesn't seem to care about recycling. I dutifully take my paper and glass to the nearby recycling station, but even then they only differentiate between green & clear glass and paper.
"Our fridge is a standard German fridge… which happens to be the same tiny size Americans have in college dorms."
Wait... my fridge is also a standard German fridge. It's about five feet tall and 2 feet wide. Not a huge SubZero, but not what I think of as a dorm room fridge.
"How do Europeans have time to go food shopping every day?"
AFAIK, they don't. I shop weekends and sometimes on the way home. But if you're just stopping in to the store that happens to be on the way home from work, and it takes you ten minutes to pick up a few fresh vegetables, it's not really a time drain.
@Morfydd, 5 feet is a wee bit taller than my dorm room fridge, but 2 feet is definitely not wider! My fridge is probably 6 feet tall and at least 3 wide, maybe more. I wish it was smaller since it's just me, but that's a standard apartment fridge here.
Gorgeous kitchen, though I think I'd cry with only two burners. Especially if they were close together. Is that them off in the left hand corner of the first photo?
I was wondering why the wall looked solid in the demolition picture and went to the original site to find out that it is indeed solid drywall. That's crazy!
Wow!
Looks great! We are a two person household and it takes so long to fill the dishwasher. As for having to wash the pots: what a great trade for such a stunning kitchen.
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madsarah, the white thing is the radiator that was originally there.
I like how they preserved the lower half of the wall and simply wrapped cabinets around it.
When I was in Europe, many homes (including my aunt's in Florence) had what we Americans call "dorm fridges." I loved being in Europe because I had so much more access to food on every street corner. I can only remember being in a big supermarket one time. The rest of the time I was in small markets and even convenience stores (which, as a rule, had exponentially better prepared foods than even most major grocery chains here). Anyhow, you don't need to buy so much at once because you can easily buy it every day (at least in many more urban areas).
i really like this kitchen a lot. but, where is the stove? is that it in the corner? seems like a really odd placement and a bit of a reach.
I have to agree with Bromelia, my two person household can easily fill the large dishwasher each day, and twice if we have company for dinner. Guess we could just eat out more with a small kitchen.
Beautiful use of the space - two thumbs up from me. The only thing I prefer is a larger fridge but that's mostly because I hate going shopping for food more than once a week.
If the rest of your apartment looks as good as your kitchen does, then by all means please enter the "Smallest, Coolest" contest. I'd love to see how creative you were with the rest of the space.
Love this...this would do it for me :)
And I was also wondering about the solid look of that wall they took down. Solid, thick drywall, that is cool, no framing required!
This is an incredible and so well thought out and bespoke transformation. It clearly changes the whole dynamic of your apartment, not just the kitchen itself. I love how cleverly you've stolen a few extra centimetres from the other side of the original wall, and how the countertop looks almost unbroken because of the inset hob (is that an induction hob?).
Incidentally, "European sized" fridges are plenty big enough, even if you don't shop every day, because we don't store every single piece of food in them, we store some stuff in cupboards or vegetable racks.
i love it!
the dishwasher is super cute. and if i were to ever own one ( we wash dishes the old fashion way in our house) i would love a small one like that
ah, bromelia, sweet and caring as always.
that is a well thought-out small place. congratulations! taking out the wall was an excellent idea.
so far i have successfully avoided having a dishwasher, and i do not need it, not even with guests in the house. i really prefer not to stuff my (small) kitchen with appliances. i can understand that people would want them, but i do not miss having one at all.
bromelia -- I agree with madsarah. I live in a two person household and the dishwasher fills up about once every two or three days, so a half size at most would have to be run every day.
Until you have a small space, stop commenting on how the person fixes theirs. The OP had a very small space to fit in an entire kitchen - a full dishwasher or full fridge would have taken up a lot of that space with just two appliances.
i wonder where you have been "observing", then.
:-D
Amazing work! It's not always fun trying to work with a tiny kitchen area, but you've done a marvelous job!! Great ideas for small spaces.
OMG this is so fabulous, so what if she has to run the dishwasher every day...if she had a large house and a large family she would any way...we need to learn to make the best use of the tiny space we've been given...thats if you live in a small space.....my condo is 550 square feet...I love and appreciate what you've done! Thanks for sharing!