In the 90s, Japanese pop culture and anime were all the rage for the kids I grew up with me included. The first time I saw a traditional Japanese Shokado bento box was in the anime series Crayon Shin-chan. I was captivated by its beauty – typically rectangular or square with multiple compartments of varying sizes to accommodate different types of food, made of lacquer and complete with a matching lid.
Fast forward to my crazy university years and I convinced myself to buy an expensive RM90.00 ($30 AUD) Japanese bento box with 18 hours of hard work from my RM5.00-per-hour part-time job at a dodgy cafe-bar with an incompetent manager who liked to flirt with young waitresses. This was an upgrade from my usual boring beige lunch box. I imagined it would impress my university mates. How wrong I was.
Typically, a Shokado bento box is filled with fluffy Japanese rice, sashimi, tempura and pickled plum; every compartment is designed for a specific dish. As if I was going to wake up at 4am to prepare lunch, and how could I afford such extravagances as a poor university student? When I put my usual lunch of wallet-friendly Spam fried rice with a sunny-side-up fried egg and stir-fried bok choy with oyster sauce in the bento box, it became a disaster-looking box. Also, the two portions of fried rice that my hippopotamus-like appetite demanded would not fit into the biggest compartment, so it overflowed into the other compartments within the bento box. It was a clown box – a joke box to my friends. One of them even said a coffin might be better suited to containing the portion of fried rice stuffed into my very expensive Shokado bento box.
It was used once and with great shame, ended up in the tallest shelf in my kitchen, never to be seen again. (Rumour has it, it became my mother's jewellery box). Later, I bought another lunch box from a night market – 10 times cheaper, but with adjustable dividers that could cater to the different types of lunch I prepared, and I used it until I graduated from university.
I once heard someone say that a small apartment is like a bento box. I forget who said it or perhaps I heard it in a dream, but it’s a romantic analogy and true to a certain point, certainly in my experience. Long after learning the hard way that a bento box was not suited to my usual lunch, I bought a 37-square-metre studio apartment off plan and upon completion, I realised that the cabinets and joinery the developer prescribed didn’t fit my lifestyle. They were hideous looking too – so hideous – they still give me nightmares. And the colour of the joinery and carpet, which were already predetermined, didn't match my taste at all. Upon moving into the brand new studio apartment, I removed every single cabinet and piece of joinery along with the close-to-poop-brown-coloured carpet, to give myself a blank canvas from which to start again. And all that brand new joinery I removed went to landfill, which I still feel guilty about today. But I managed to redesign my apartment around my lifestyle. It had a place for my piano and I chose the storage unit I needed in the style I wanted. All of this created a flexible floor plan that allowed me to rearrange it several times while living there, transitioning from having a new partner moving in, to having our puppy together because “life evolves, get used to it”, like my mother used to say. Designing a small apartment with a flexible floor plan that you can play around with: chef's kiss. This is what I’ve learned from living in small apartments for the last 24 years, so why don’t we make more small apartments like this?
On Sundays, some people might pick up a good book, but I look at new real estate listings for small apartments online. I’m not looking for a new property, I just like to study them religiously. There’s a pattern with modern small apartment design these days, especially in Australia. Small apartments (let’s say, anything below 50 square metres), are often designed as mere containers for basic living needs – a place to sleep, cook, eat, wash and shit. Basic living needs are not enough, because we are human, not animals in captivity (which is also wrong). Why don’t developers address other needs living in a small apartment like a space to pursue hobbies, exercise, entertain visitors, work from home, and also respond to our cultural backgrounds, religions or our desire to pursue our dreams?
The boring answer, in my context in Australia at least, is that there are rules and regulations in place when it comes to building new apartments that serve to prevent cowboy developers from constructing subpar homes. In government-mandated design guidelines in the state of Victoria, where I live, there is a requirement for a total minimum storage volume of eight cubic metres for a studio apartment and 10 cubic metres for one-bedroom dwelling. For scale, an elephant has a volume of about five cubic metres. Developers often fulfil these requirements by incorporating as much storage as possible into the apartment without even giving a second thought to how residents will actually use these spaces, now or into the future. This results in wardrobes built in odd locations within sleeping spaces or built-in storage solutions that do not effectively meet the needs of the human or humans living in the apartment. While on paper it may seem beneficial, the reality is that effective storage solutions and a large volume of storage space are two different things.
Of course, there’s still a need to design functional storage for kitchen and bathroom areas, but they shouldn’t be too excessive, because not everyone loves cooking or has a lot of toiletries. Surely it’s better for people to supplement if they need to rather than having to remove built-in storage when they don’t? There is a wide range of storage solutions available in the market, ranging from upscale to affordable options. Everyone interprets their layout differently, resulting in apartment units with unique styles and usage of space. Surely we can trust individuals to decide their storage solutions and apartment layouts, as people these days can readily get inspiration, tips and ideas.
Another thing I want to get out of my system is my gripe with small one-bedroom apartments. I can understand the difference in price comes down to the inclusion of a wall to separate spaces but this can sometimes reduce the effectiveness of spatial arrangement, as where I live, the minimum size requirement for the main bedroom is 10.2 square metres and 10 square metres for the living room. Therefore, even though you can technically place a bed in the middle and have access around it, the perimeters around the bed are usually reserved for access and cannot be repurposed for other uses. And the internal wall thickness typically is 110 millimetres (give-or-take), in an already small apartment, it’s a waste of precious space. Imagine if you’re a writer or an artist where you will need a bigger table to work on your art, where should you put it?
And if one really needs a wall, or to create space separation, there are many ways to do it in a small apartment. Typically small apartments are single-person dwellings or a home for a couple. Therefore, privacy may not be the priority, but if we can start designing removable or flexible walls that could respond to changing needs or modes of living, that really would be something. Sliding doors, curtains, or furniture pieces could also be used effectively to create a sense of demarcation. And in return, we could reduce the cost of unnecessary storage and joinery, and then perhaps the developer would be kind enough to reduce the sale price of the apartment to make it more affordable? One can hope.
All of this needs to be considered when we’re designing and building small footprint housing options for future dwellers. Rather than rules, codes and developers dictating how we live small, design and development should lead to more flexible spaces that residents take ownership of to create a space that truly is their own. Maybe something like a bento box with flexible dividers?
