Our home is more than a 45-square-meter loft; it is a living, breathing testament to our shared history and the philosophy of iterating until a space finally feels right. When we decided to buy this apartment from Kun’s mother, we weren’t just buying walls; we were claiming a piece of Amsterdam’s history, a district where houses were built without aesthetic restrictions, allowing each structure to tell a different story. For me, the creative process began the moment I saw the high ceilings and the massive windows opening up to the waterfront, flooding the space with southern light.
Living in such a small footprint demands a tailored way of living, an intimacy where every object must be considered and every corner must serve a purpose. I find a quiet joy in the modularity of our home, using “molecrates” made of sustainable Baltic birch to customize our space into everything from bedside tables to room dividers. There is an emotional weight to the items we’ve chosen to surround ourselves with. For instance, the light in our hall isn’t just a fixture; it’s a memory I carried home in my hand luggage, found in an abandoned factory in Istanbul. Similarly, the industrial switch by our bed, which solved the inconvenience of the entrance-only light controls, was a treasure salvaged from a factory in Belgium.
The heart of my creative expression is found in the kitchen and the living area. Because I love to cook, the huge spice rack we built above the kitchen island is both a functional necessity and a sensory centerpiece. We chose to keep the calm, original gray of the kitchen, but we added our own soul to the room through the pink cabinet backed by green tiles. That cabinet is a secret world of its own, hiding a desk and a sanctuary for our cat. If you look closely at the corner tiles we placed ourselves, you’ll find a hidden gem: a tile featuring our own signatures, a permanent mark of our hands on this home.
The transition between inside and out was perhaps our greatest challenge. We dreamed of extending our life toward the water, which led to the creation of a floating terrace. It was a grueling process—building it indoors, de-assembling it to move around a central column, and then reassembling it outside—but it was worth the effort to feel the air from the deck. Inside, we use floor-to-ceiling mirrors to bounce the light and create a spacious feeling, while soft curtains surround our bed to create a separate, peaceful zone for sleep.
This home is a combination of personal things we found and things we made, a blend of existing elements and new dreams. It is a space that doesn’t just house us; it reflects us. Through the use of multifunctional furniture and a commitment to neatness, we have turned a tiny loft into a sanctuary that feels as vast as the waterfront view outside our windows.