Nuvria — small-space organization | nuvria.org
The real floor-area ranges of capsules, micro-apartments and tiny houses in m² and sq ft — and how to measure your own room before planning anything.
The three small-space types are defined by numbers before they are defined by style. A capsule hotel guest room is a chamber roughly the length and width of a single bed, tall enough to crawl in and sit up, stacked two units high; hotels range from about 50 to 700 capsules. A microapartment is a one-room self-contained living space with sitting space, sleeping space, bathroom and kitchenette within 14–32 m² (150–350 sq ft). A tiny house, under the International Residential Code, has a floorspace no larger than 400 sq ft (37 m²).
Those bands are not interchangeable. Merriam-Webster allows tiny houses up to 500 sq ft (46 m²), and one architectural firm used a 600 sq ft (56 m²) threshold. Meanwhile micro-units are defined as units under 500 sq ft, and nanounits as units under 200 sq ft. The same physical room can therefore sit inside two labels at once, which is why the number matters more than the name.
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Before planning any layout, measure three things. First, the floor rectangle: length times width, in metres and in square feet. Compare it to 14–32 m² for micro-apartments and ≤400 sq ft for tiny houses under the IRC. Second, the ceiling height: note whether you are in the 2.7–3.0 m band used at Carmel Place, or below 2.4 m. Third, the door swing and window sill, because an inward-opening door removes roughly a square metre of usable floor.
Write the three numbers down. If your floor is under 14 m² you are below the micro-apartment band and closer to a nanounit, which means storage must move upward rather than outward. If you are between 14 and 32 m² you are inside the micro-apartment band and the standard one-room layout logic applies. If you are between 32 and 37 m² you are at the top of the tiny-house band, where a separate sleeping volume becomes realistic.
The measuring step is also where most plans fail. Buying furniture before measuring the door swing, or assuming a 2.7 m ceiling when the room is 2.3 m, produces layouts that look correct on paper and do not fit in the room. The floor-area table on the main page lists the bands; this page is the procedure that turns a band into a plan.
Further reading