Graham Hill, founder of Tree Hugger and now founder of Life Edited is selling his 420 sq. ft. transforming NYC micro apartment called the LE1. You might remember my original post on it way back. (UPDATE: SOLD)
If you haven’t seen this apartment in action before, I think you’re in for a real treat. If you’re interested in purchasing it, beware because it’s not cheap (we’re talking about NYC here).
Either way I mostly wanted to show it off to you so you can see what’s really possible in small space when you have money to spare and the creative willingness to step outside of the box.
420 Sq. Ft. NYC Micro Apartment For Sale

Images: Matthew Williams for LifeEdited & Corcoran





















Images: Matthew Williams for LifeEdited & Corcoran
Video Tour with Graham Hill (Owner/Builder) and Leah Solomon (Listing Agent)
Asking price? $995,000. Pricing explained here: http://www.lifeedited.com/own-the-lifeedited-apartment/
Most Notable Features of this Apartment
- Can seat up to 12 people for dinner thanks to genius furniture.
- Has the functionality of an apartment that’s twice it’s size.
- Can accommodate two overnight guests.
- Has more built in storage than you might think.
- You can watch movies with the projection home theater system.
Learn more at the original listing: http://www.corcoran.com/nyc/Listings/Display/3168153
About LifeEdited, Graham Hill, and this Apartment
TED Talk with Graham Hill: Less Stuff, More Happiness
Resources
- For Sale Listing (SOLD)
- Original story at LifeEdited
- Tree Hugger (as seen on)
- Even More Photos and Floor Plans of this apartment
- Construction photos of the apartment (before & after)
If you enjoyed this 420 sq. ft. NYC micro apartment tour and for sale listing you’ll love our free daily tiny house newsletter with more!
Alex
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Almost perfect! Now build this out of a couple of shipping containers next to a rushing mountain stream for a total cost well under $100k and it would be perfect. Genius use of space.
Heck yes Kelly. Great idea. I’d also love to see this done in other less expensive areas for more affordability.
Love it, love it, love it. No more to say really as this apartment is so full of great design. Thankyou for sharing. Cheers from Australia.
Thanks Brian! Glad you enjoyed it :))
This ingenious apt. isn’t “micro”. It isn’t even “tiny”. By New York standards, and those of many other large cities, this is just a small apartment.
Good point. My fault for the wording. The only people who’d consider it micr or tiny are those living in 1000+ or 2000+ sf (who have never seriously looked at or considered tiny homes).
True, Alex. It is brilliantly designed space.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. And here is why:
This is a concept type design with very little practical application to the “real world.”
Who in their right mind wants to be shifting walls all the time to create new spaces. And, who wants to do this to bring out the beds at night when you are dog tired? Hands up… oh… none. I rest my case.
I understand where you’re coming from but if you wanted you can leave the bed out for yourself and you still have partial amount of couch space to use. And your work desk can still be out too. I think it would work out for me just fine. But I still get where you’re coming from. Thanks Paul
The thing is that you would not be moving walls “all the time.” One would probably leave the space in one configuration most of the time and change it only when necessary. For instance, you wouldn’t pull out the “guest room” except when you were having overnight guests. And one would only pull out the Goliath table when one was having a dinner occasion. And being that it is the apartment of a single man, I’d bet he probably leaves his main bed folded down except when he wants to clean up a bit for guests.
Besides, in a city like New York where space is a premium, it is not at all unusual for apartments to utilize murphy beds and other types of fold out furniture to maximize space. If one is too lazy to fold out their bed at night, they better be able to afford a larger space.
Thanks Sam. Well said.
Truly awesome.
One question…where does the huge table and chairs go when not in use?
The chairs are stacked in one of the closets and the table simply pulls out to become larger. The videos show how it works 🙂
Alex, I keep wondering why that pull-out wall is so thick. Is there storage in there that we can’t see?
Personally, I wouldn’t waste the space on beds for visitors to sleep. I would put something else there … for me to store, use or enjoy……and if and when I had overnight guests I would have an air mattress for them to sleep on. On the floor. Or, they could go to a hotel.
Not that I don’t appreciate the ‘clean lines’ and the ‘less is more’ design, but wouldn’t a correctly scaled convex mirror with a molded black frame add interest to the living room? And a couple of things framed but still minimalist…….but with color? These things would take up no extra square footage and might help people imagine living there. OK, and a flat screen. 50″. And a contemporary window covering and a plant – hanging, of course.
But come on Alex, really, where’s your stuff?? I have a feeling it’s mostly still at your parents house. Am I right?
Hey Ellen,
Alex would not know where the extra stuff is, it is not his house.
The name of the owner is Graham Hill.
There are more pictures available http://www.lifeedited.com/see-full-set-of-official-lifeedited-apartment-photos/ found in the article written by Alex above.
I think this in ingenious. For a young single person it would be fabulous! Invite all your friends over to watch the huge TV. So many
ways to keep guests comfortable. It is not my style (the overly clean white look is cold to me) but wow, the possibilities in Manhattan.
Hi
This is interesting, however, I’d simply do away with the expense of having the sliding panel at all. You’d save a whack of money and your living room would be a couple of feet wider. Put the TV on the same wall as the two bunks and just fold them out when needed and use the curtains if necessary/desired to separate the two rooms.
Accepted you’d lose some storage space currently there in the sliding wall, although you could make the bunk wall deeper to compensate a heck of a lot cheaper. It must have cost a lot of money to make that sliding wall and I see no benefit in having it. It simply makes the room smaller and more costly.
Just my $0.02. I actually love transforming componentry, but I also have to see a use for it. Am I missing something? Is there something that I’ve not taken into account?
Cheers
W
I had a ~ 300 sf NYC apartment that my cat and I lived in in Riverdale (North Bronx). I regularly threw tea parties for 7-8 friends. I had huge closet space, an actual functional kitchen with full sized appliances, 35′ linear feet of windows with a sweeping skyline view of manhattan and the hudson river. I maintained and ran my couture costume business out of it for about a decade (with ALL my stuff to make costumes in it, no secondary storage, and yes, you could walk through it easily.) I didn’t regard it as ‘living tiny’, I regarded it as my ‘bigger than all my friends’ apartment. It would actually have been very easy for me to downsize further since I didn’t use most of that space very well most of the time and it was largely just full of my making stuff. In perspective, 420 sf in NY is huge and that price is actually not unreasonable.
This place is just so clever!. It should be installed in a museum.
I love this space! The design is brilliant. Easy to covert. I’d be very interested in purchasing a micro apt like this in Soho.
While the adaptability factor is superb, I would suggest that living their as either a single parent or as a couple with two children (as implied by the bunk beds) would be an exercise in insanity. However if you had only weekend or every other weekend custody, this is a brilliant idea. However given the million dollar price tag, this isn’t for me – in my neck of the woods even a 5 bedroom home will only set you back 250k…
This place seems to be for a single person (on the overall) and possibly a couple. I don’t get all the extra beds. If one has children, is this really the best space to raise them in? And I can’t imagine doing so much entertaining that you require extra beds (unless the point is to get so inebriated that staying over is preferable to navigating the subways at night.) I like the idea of moving walls and reconfiguring the space but I would rather see better spaces when one is done moving the walls. Interesting design concept otherwise, I just question how practical it is over the long term because you have all this space dedicated to these beds that are just storage in the walls.
This is the way smart young people, in particular, plan to live. While mine was the generation of larger and less practical, this is the generation of responsibility, living smaller yet having more life in the process. Economic necessity and the sense we need not use more than we need (or deserve) is permeating the minds and hearts of the young (in particular), although there are some “oldsters” like me who think the same.
At that price better to spend a very tiny portion of that money and live elsewhere. I just don’t see the appeal of living or even visiting in New York.
Ok, you want to spend a-mighty bunch of $, just to size down. The initial expenditure is way out of any future $ I will or would spend. i like my ranch.
If you had a couple of million in reserve in Investments and you wanted to work or stay awhile in the bigger cities (on and off) and not throw money at high end hotels while in town , than maybe you run the #s and it works.