Living in Poland’s micro-apartments
Tiny apartments are becoming trendy in Warsaw. City planners are celebrating, but the critics say they violate Polish building regulations.
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00:00The future of living has come to Warsaw.
00:0415 floors, 3,000 apartments, most of them tiny and narrow hallways,
00:08but some Poles are making palaces of them.
00:13Hello and welcome to my micro-apartment in Warsaw.
00:22First you come into the entrance foyer, which doubles as a living space.
00:27Then the kitchenette with everything I need.
00:34It looks like Louis XIV, but we're in the home of Artur I.
00:39The clearest difference to Warsaw is that Artur resides in just 18 square meters.
00:47But he too attaches great importance to pomp and splendor.
00:52Every centimeter counts.
00:55The bathroom has sliding doors, which make the usable space larger,
01:00and on top of that, much more glamorous.
01:05There are videos of even smaller apartments on the web,
01:09as if they're trying to break the record for the smallest.
01:14Minimalist living is the current real estate hype in the Polish metropolis.
01:18Apartment towers as close as possible to the city center,
01:21popularly known as Little Hong Kong or Chinatown.
01:28Tomasz Oszewski is an architect at a Warsaw university
01:32and sees minimalism as the way of the future.
01:35When you consider how much you actually need to survive, to sleep,
01:40you may come to the conclusion that you don't need,
01:44you don't have to have a huge apartment.
01:47Artur Sagajewski would agree.
01:49The botanist has traveled extensively, and now his mini apartment is home.
01:56An apartment like this is quite enough for me.
01:59I've always been something of a recluse,
02:02so it's enough for me to retreat to this enclave of peace and calm.
02:09Along with a few hundred neighbors,
02:12Along with a few hundred neighbors in the residential tower.
02:16How are they faring here?
02:18We want to ask them, trying at dozens of apartment doors on almost all floors.
02:23But no one wants to talk to us on camera.
02:29No wonder, because there's a major catch with the micro-apartments.
02:33They're illegal.
02:36An apartment must be at least 25 square meters in size.
02:41Adrian Wazowski knows what he's talking about.
02:44He's a credit advisor in Warsaw's banking district.
02:48Micro-apartments are booming,
02:50even though the apartments are much smaller than is allowed.
02:53And that's the trick.
02:56When developers build space below that minimum area,
02:59they're not counted as apartments,
03:01but as commercial spaces, service units.
03:07They're attractive for investors,
03:09who buy the properties and rent them out by the thousands.
03:14In the elevator, they're officially listed as offices,
03:18allowing them to bypass building regulations.
03:22It supports the trend for apartments being rented cheaply and short-term.
03:27That's still the exception for Poland,
03:29where almost 90% of people own their homes.
03:34You don't have to have it on your own.
03:36You don't have to have it for your life.
03:38You can rent it.
03:40You can have it here, and the next year you can have it elsewhere.
03:44You can be today in Warsaw, tomorrow in Munich,
03:48and two years from now you can be in Hong Kong or Dubai.
03:53Our tour the first has settled into his mini-Versailles for the long term.
03:58He's not planning to move out of his 18 square meters anytime soon.
04:06I haven't had a housewarming party here yet because it's not all finished.
04:10But I'll invite friends and have a nice evening.
04:15We haven't spotted a bed, though, and he doesn't want to show it to us.
04:20Well, it's a bit messy.
04:22It's a classic sofa bed, so I fold it out and sleep here.
04:26But first, every evening, he takes in the view from his micro-apartments
04:30over the booming city of Warsaw.