Today we’re taking a break from our  Brisbane renovation project to share something we thought is a fun and interesting  post.

Whilst we here in Australia are after spacious stuff—spacious kitchen, spacious dining, spacious bathroom, spacious bedroom—did you know that elsewhere, a small (read: narrow) house is, well, a common thing?

One of our avid podcast listeners, Paul (who is currently traveling the world and still manages to be updated with our podcast episode—thanks, Paul!) came across this narrow house in Osaka, Japan and thought of sharing it to our EPI readers:

Narrow house in Japan

 Just how narrow is it? Paul writes: “The block is quite long as you can see, but the frontage is barely 1.5m as per my headphone cable (even accounting for the thickness of the perimeter walls). The man did take me down the hall, however, where 3/4 way down, the width increases to about 3m. Still narrow, but at least would fit a bed (or rolled out tatami—a Japanese mat).”

We immediately Googled “small houses in Japan” and turns out, what Paul encountered isn’t really a novel thing. Micro housing spurred in Japan during the 1990s when real estate prices shoot up, coupled with recession. It has since been a famous Japanese residential architecture. Go ahead, do a Google image search and let us know what you think of these mini houses.

So that’s a bit of a trivia for us there. Thanks, Paul, for sharing!