Living In Paris, You Have To Sacrifice Space

Anybody who lives in Paris will have to get used to living in small spaces.   Downsizing is essential if you want to live in lilliputian Parisian apartments!

When I came here over 20 years ago, the sudden transition to suddenly living in a small place wasn’t really difficult.  After all, I arrived with 3 suitcases and two little dachshunds!

Even though I now live in a larger apartment, it certainly could not be classified as spacious, by American standards!

Space is an acculturation process that like osmosis pervades our sense of what constitutes appropriate living physical space.  Personal space is acquired likewise and differs from country to country.

If you grow up in the  North American continent or Australia you are probably used to expansive landscapes and large dwellings, except for some urbanites.

Asians and Southeast Asians generally reside in smaller homes and apartments.  Variables can be formed culturally and socioeconomically.

That doesn’t mean someone who grows up in a vast chateau can’t adapt to smaller confines, but it may be more difficult.

Space is precious in Paris and extremely costly when you rent and especially so to buy!  The average cost of buying a square meter in Paris apartments is currently around 10, 276 euros per square meter.

Some arrondissements, of course, go higher or lower   Other determining cost actors are the height of the place, available sunlight and having nonobstructive views.

Paris prohibits renting an apartment less than 9 square meters, but there are still quite a few still offered by slum lords.

Real estate crooks are selling even box-like spaces as small as 4 to 5 sq meters for well over 10,000 euros per sq meter, according to the Le Figaro edition recently.

Even if the apartment needs major renovation, like the one I bought, 10 years ago,  the major cost determinant was the square meterage!

It is a challenge at times to find space to arrange things, like for example,  my new powerful vacuum cleaner.

I am tired of it being a fixture in my bedroom unless I can label it contemporary art?  I am going to have to somehow push some hanging clothes enough aside in our only box like closet to accommodate it!

My former standup vacuum was as ridiculously weak as a child’s toy, so I really needed a new one. Other than posing a storage problem, it’s powerful outreach never misses a crumb!

The only two places I really miss having space is in my galleys like kitchen and balcony garden.   As a passionate cook,  my kitchen gets a work out every day.

Finding a place for all of my utensils, pots and bakeware is difficult.  I hesitate to hang them up garage-style on a pegboard so as to not invade the already rather narrow corridor.

Plus the walls are all very thick concrete, which is great for sound isolation, but not for do it your self-drilling.

I recently installed new oak wood kitchen counters, which my Moldavian renovator assures are resistive as well as nice looking, but only if they are kept varnished every 6 months or so.  So, once again I am trying to look for new ways to create space.

I am a minimalist when it comes to counter appliances.   Just my ancient but still whirling Kitchen Aid K5 mixer, a robot coupe, and coffee maker along with a champagne bucket full of utensils, a knife holder and chopping board are out.

Yes, I do sometimes complain about my smaller refrigerator.  In the winter, the garden étagere on my balcony makes for cold storage of some vegetables I might have overbought at the marché.

In the past, apartments here had a wooden cold box jutting outside from the kitchen that served as a “frig”.  In the summer I am always mindful of what my frig can hold!

When all my summer flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits are in place, my balcony is wall to wall plants creating an illusion of a vast garden scene, at least in colour and species, if not dimension.

Yes, I wish I had more room for my books, most of which are now boxed away in my cave, where I also store my wines and everything else.  Yes, I wish I had another bedroom too.

It is not at all unusual to find a washing machine in a tiny Parisian kitchen, but at least my salle de bain(bathtub and sink room) had enough room for a washer that also drys.

I have a separate room for the WC as do most other older Parisian apartments.  The French have a strong preference for the toilette not being in the “bathing” room.

I have seen rather comical scenes of accommodating toilettes in minuscule studios here!  I remember visiting student rentals for my son with one prominently stuck in the living space or even in the kitchen area!

You have to consider that it wasn’t too long ago in Paris that toilettes and bathing facilities were out in the hall for shared usage.

My second apartment here was in a building circa the 1700s, where a neighbouring family still used the WC  facing the spiral staircase!

They are still evident on the top floors of old bourgeois apartment buildings where domestics were housed for individual families.

The maids of long ago may have had tiny spaces to hang their hat, but they generally had the best views! Nowadays these “chambres de bonnes” go for prime space to be bought up to make larger apartments.

A good friend, who had the tiniest kitchen I had ever seen in her studio pied à terre bought up several next to hers creating a real kitchen and now has a lovely two bedroom renovated apartment, plus a guest room across the hall!

There is an old saying that in Paris, don’t expect any apartment to totally meet all of your expectations.  Besides sacrificing space, you generally have to learn to live without something else you would have liked.

Of course, if you are independently wealthy enough to invest a few million, you might as well buy a château in the countryside and settle for a Parisian pied à terre for weekends!

In my arrondissement, there is still a trickle of individual two or three-story houses squeezed in between apartment buildings.  They may offer increased space, but rarely much sunlight except the one seen across from my place, classified as a historical building.

Having an elevated placement and a balcony for all my plants and flowers with enough sunlight was essential for me.   No northern orientations,  even if it had a view of the Eiffel Tower.

I remember turning down one like that, even though the realtor pointed out that it got reflected sunlight off the adjacent buildings, but only in the late afternoon.  Nothing like a realtor to reinterpret any minuses!

My plants have had to learn to make it in small spaces and in very close accommodation to each other too!  I discovered that tomato plants, for example, can be quite productive even if snug to each other!

Creating physical space may be limited in living here, but space in some ways is existential. For example, when we meditate or pray we are creating unlimited space.

Whenever I look out over the rooftops of Paris framed by my pretty colourful flowers and dangling fruit seeing birds flying high in the sky, space becomes as vast and expansive as I can see.

Having limited living space has an advantage in that you think twice about buying anything that does take up precious space!  Accumulating stuff is just ridiculous unless you really need or use it often.

It all comes down to your perspective of things, my friends.  We can tweak many things in our lives to see the pluses rather than the minuses.

Life throws so many curveballs to derail us in each of our lifetimes, that in order to survive we are constantly called to change our perspective of things in our life that we can’t change.

Just like a potted plant, we have to choose to bloom where we are planted!