Tiny Home Test Drive

Last week, the first tenants moved into the city’s first micro apartment development on East 27th Street. I did, too, for one night.

Tucked into a New York City Housing Authority site, on a spot between First and Second Avenues that was once a parking lot, and flanked by linden and honeylocust trees and a small plaza lined with park benches, the nine-story building, with 55 apartments between 260 and 360 square feet, is an elegant design by nArchitects, and built by Monadnock Development and the Lower East Side People’s Mutual Housing Association.

It’s also adorable, a compressed vision of the city in both ethos and mien. Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, nArchitects’ founding principals, imagined it as four slender stepped towers, like a mini skyline.

On that hot evening, the benches outside were full of kibitzing men of a certain age; the playground across Mount Carmel Place, the two-block street that bisects the site, had largely emptied out but for a few stragglers. Knots of pedestrians wafted by. The ghost of Jane Jacobs hovered.

Carmel Place, formerly known as My Micro NY, was the winner of the small space/tiny home competition sponsored by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development in 2013. For the last three years, its flourishes and features — the modular units prefabricated in a factory in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard and stacked like Legos on site; its capacious common areas and windowed hallways; the humane and lovely elements of the apartments, like 8-foot windows and nearly 10-foot ceilings — have been on display, at first in renderings, and finally, in a model apartment that was tricked out last winter.

For housing advocates, the architectural community and urban policy makers, the building is a trial balloon for a medley of themes: the changing demographic of a city with inadequate housing (according to the NYU Furman Center, a third of the city’s households are single people); a culture eager to make a smaller environmental footprint by paring down belongings and sharing resources; and what has become a unicorn in this city, affordable housing.

Carmel Place is no affordable housing utopia, but it’s a start. While the lion’s share — 32 — of the units are market rate, with monthly rents ranging from $2,446 to $3,195, eight have been set aside for formerly homeless veterans, and 14 units are designated affordable, with monthly rents from $914 to $1,873, and for which 60,000 people applied in a lottery. One apartment has been set aside for the superintendent. Fifty percent of the building is already leased.

It’s a nice place for a sleepover. The 302-square-foot unit I stayed in rents for $2,670 a month, furnished, which includes convertible and small-space objects from Resource Furniture. That company’s sofa-wall bed combination called Penelope (my destiny?), made in Italy by Clei, is the linchpin of the space: a Murphy-style bed, surrounded by deep cabinets, that unfolds over a diminutive charcoal-gray sofa.

I spent a good half-hour practicing opening and closing that bed, which is heavier and trickier than anything Bernadette Castro ever tackled, but much, much more comfortable, because it has a proper-size mattress and a firm base. (The two photographers who had accompanied me on my mission declined to help, perhaps taking their journalistic ethics too seriously.)

The aesthetic vibe of the apartment is hipster Scandinavian, a state that had been achieved by Jacqueline Schmidt, the director of design at Ollie, a company that has embellished Carmel Place with housewares, furniture and services, from dry cleaning to “unique community engagement opportunities” — in other words, mixers, day trips and other “curated events” geared to well-employed millennials (urban renters, in Ollie’s parlance).

There were knobbly succulents in small ceramic biomorphic planters with leather straps hung on a wall (succulents are good pets for small-scale living, since they don’t need much attention, as Ms. Schmidt pointed out); black and white prints of endangered animals; and voluminous canvas baskets set here and there, to hide the sofa pillows and other detritus when you unpack your bed for the night. There was also a white Parsons-style table, also from Resource Furniture, that extends (with leaves) to seat 10. The leaves live in the large front-hall closet.

The kitchen is, proportionally, massive. With a 27-square-foot counter, its total zone, if you count the opposite wall, is 84 square feet, more than a quarter of the apartment’s entire volume. There are a two-burner stove top, a very large microwave and a toaster oven, but no conventional oven, which concerned Ginia, one of five colleagues I invited to dinner and to road-test the apartment.

“If groovy millennials are all about cooking and Instagramming the vegan cheesecakes they are making,” she said later, “how do you live that life with a two-burner stove?”

Feh, countered Julia, another of my colleagues. Very few people living alone use their whole stove for cooking or fill their full-size refrigerators, she said. “Many of them use their ovens to store shoes or sweaters.”

In any event, I ordered in, pizzas and fennel salads from Motorino on East 12th Street. Vivian brought flowers, in case someone was moved to Instagram. I hankered for candles, and flicked off the overhead lights.

The apartment comes with recessed ceiling and undercabinet lights on dimmers, along with a nifty task light you tap on and off, and a tough-looking standing lamp with a bare bulb, chosen by Ms. Schmidt. Still, there was no way to read comfortably in bed. Ms. Schmidt said she had been bothered by that deficiency, too, so she’s ordered LED lights you’ll be able to clip to the side of the cabinets on either side of the bed.

We could have sat eight; 10 would have been pushing it. As it was, there wasn’t room to open the fridge or push back the chairs — these were solid Italian folding chairs with a slim profile that fit in the closet; you get four with your furnished apartment. We didn’t really notice, being well exercised by office gossip and shared work trauma. My guests were delighted by the Penelope contraption, and plopped down on the bed to test its mettle. They enthused over the spare décor and shiny surfaces. Easy to hose down, opined Alexandra and Julia.

“It is the working mother’s dreamscape!” wrote Ginia a few days later. “Micro apartments take me away — 300-Lego-free square feet! But where do you put the books?”

The best part of the evening, to my mind, was being alone again, after whisking away the pizza boxes and the bottles, shrinking the table back to its slim desk size, and unfolding my namesake bed. I killed the lights, slid open the window and raised the opaque shade, so I could see a linden tree from my nest. As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined a life swept clean of my grubby, needy possessions and instead envisioned a new, improved one that was sparely accessorized by Ms. Schmidt’s resilient and independent succulents, neutral art prints and soft baskets. So lightly encumbered, I would spring easily from my tasteful and tidy micro unit into the cultural soup of the city. Which is the point, of course.

I thought, too, of the canon of the studio apartment — from the dreary bed-sitters housing the heroines of Anita Brookner and Barbara Pym novels to Laurie Colwin’s cozy nest in the West Village, where she hunkered down happily, alone with an eggplant and a chipped Meissen dish; and Quentin Crisp’s gothic and lordly squalor on East Third Street. And I worried.

Perhaps this apartment is too good, too soft, for the demographic it purports to address. How will they mature in a friction-free environment? It irritated me that a 25-year-old would soon be lolling in my bed, or in the lounge chairs on the roof deck, after having fired up the commercial grill there, and after a long day of networking in some shared work space, or returning home from a day’s surfing in the Rockaways, tucking his surfboard into the space Mr. Bunge and Ms. Hoang designed for it.

Carmel Place’s rent includes not just internet and Wi-Fi, but a weekly tidying service and a monthly deep clean, along with dog walking, dry cleaning pickup and any number of customized errands through an app called Hello Alfred, all organized by Ollie.

Ms. Schmidt said her company is about to announce more building alliances that will allow Carmel Place residents to avail themselves of more and more thermal pools, yoga studios and barbecue pits all over town. “You will meet with your home manager to say what you want for your home experience,” Ms. Schmidt said. “Maybe you want your slippers by the door, or your towels folded a certain way.”

As it happens, it’s not just the market-rate tenants who will be coddled. Ollie has donated its services to the veterans, and offered them at cost to those in the affordable units.

It was her intent, Ms. Schmidt said, to think aspirationally about micro living. (She and her husband, David Friedlander, sold all their belongings a few years ago and moved with their two young sons from a 1,200-square- foot loft to a light and lean 675-square-foot apartment Ms. Schmidt gutted and redesigned with sliding panels instead of doors, convertible beds and a few choice pieces of furniture.)

The single state itself is also now aspirational, with boosters like Sasha Cagen, the author behind the quirkyalone blog and book; Rebecca Traister, a writer at large at New York Magazine and the author of “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation”; and Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.

A decade ago, Mr. Klinenberg set out to write a book tentatively called “Alone in America” that would chronicle the rise of single adults in the United States — according to a Pew study published in 2011, only 51 percent of adults 18 and older are married (compared with 72 percent in 1960) — and explore themes of isolation and loneliness. What he found instead was that for the overwhelming majority of single people, living alone meant being social.

His 2012 book, “Going Solo,” examined the ways contemporary urban singletons, as he called them, were finding community and generally having a blast. “People live alone together in neighborhoods that are full of people just like them,” he said recently. “You can name those neighborhoods, in cities like Chicago or San Francisco or New York,” he added, “because those are the places you visit to have the best time. It’s where the bars and restaurants and galleries are. It’s where you want to be.”

In his book, Mr. Klinenberg traces the history of single living in bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village, where at the turn of the 20th century, you could live alone without stigma. The male pioneers were followed by single women, who had been liberated by work and evolving social norms; some were buoyed by the ideals of “the free and independent republic of Washington Square,” as Marcel Duchamp and friends famously proclaimed from the arch. Developers were already building so-called bachelor apartments there.

“New York has long been a leader in social innovation,” Mr. Klinenberg said. “The trend of living alone happened here before anywhere else.”

My first single-person’s apartment in New York City was a studio on Christopher Street, in a prewar tenement building with a hallway that smelled of cat and scorched garlic. There was a kitchen of sorts in a cubby space with a tiny Royal Rose stove, a sink and a mini fridge — but I never cooked there.

I was no Laurie Colwin (I don’t recall owning a pot) and anyway, the Korean market on Bleecker Street was my cafeteria. It was 1984; on weekends, the young men who came downtown to showboat kept me awake until 5 a.m., but I didn’t care. When I wasn’t cursing them, I loved watching the performance.

The kitchen and bathroom windows looked out onto a grimy air shaft, and right into my neighbors’ apartments, so at night I did a lot of ducking, being too slack to install a shade or even tack up a sheet. If you closed the bathroom door, you’d be stuck until a PATH train rumbled past and shook it free. (My first night in the apartment, I spent two hours trapped in there, having closed the door firmly to clean the black and white herringbone tile floor.)

Mostly, my tiny apartment was a launching pad, and I was thrilled to be living alone.