- Does a painting need an immense canvas to be considered a masterpiece? Leonardo da Vinci"s "Mona Lisa" is 30 inches high by just over 20 inches wide. "Van Gogh"s room in Aries" is 22 inches high by 29 inches wide. The obvious, instinctive answer is that there is no relationship whatsoever between the size of the canvas and the originality of a work of art, even if the latter could be measured. But does the same apply to interior design? Can one deliver a creative, balanced, elegant and comfortable interior design in a small apartment of 300 to 400 square feet? This book shows that it is indeed possible.The progressive shrinking of city apartments, together with the widespread increasing cost of housing, has led to a search for interior designs that make the most of the area available, natural light sources and storage space. Hence the success of multinationals such as Ikea, who brave made a virtue of necessity by thinking up a decorative "ideology" based on the idea of taking full advantage of the space and designing furniture that has been devised and manufactured to be used in much reduced and constantly changing spaces. Interior designers and decorators have also had to adapt quickly to this new reality by implementing resources and devices that are hardly ever used in larger homes. The result is a philosophy of life centered on the small-scale, the flexible and the adaptable. It is not only the size of the apartments that has changed; our style of life has also been altered along with it.The projects included in this book have been chosen for their originality, their creativity (at times enormous) and their ability to take full advantage of the most awkward of spaces, with "awkward" here being a synonym for "lack of space". The intelligent use of colors, the exploitation of redundant corners, the popularization of multi-purpose shelving and materials that are more modern, lighter and visually trendier than traditional ones all help to turn a tiny industrial-style loft into a comfortable, functional living space. Spectacular advances in the field of industrial design also encourage experimenting with new forms and styles for furniture, which is constantly being adapted to new requirements.