This Small Home Tour has been a while in the making. I finally got the opportunity to take photos of Eva and Kyle’s lovely east Vancouver apartment. Eva is a talented photographer (and event designer and overall creative) so I was very nervous to fumble around her with my camera! Kyle even taught me how to better use my camera settings! And then we had charcuterie on their lovely patio. Will be accepting many more Small Home Tours if they are all like this, haha. Anyway! Kyle and Eva have taken a typical wood frame 1-bedroom Vancouver apartment layout and really made it their own. Happy to share too many photos (sorry, that’s what happens whenever I take them) and Eva’s encouraging ethos for small living.

Intro:

Eva works in public health in substance use & homelessness; Kyle works in air quality and climate. You can find them @eva_mcm and @kyle_mchowe .

How big is your home and what is the layout ?

640 sqft + 401 sqft patio

Who lives there?

Eva & Kyle & our geriatric dog Mckee

A view of the dining room from the hallway

Tell me about your choice to live small. Was it a conscious decision or did it just evolve?

We moved to Vancouver after Kyle finished his Masters and I was starting mine, both living oﬀ my camp counsellor salary 15 years ago. Needless to say we had an extremely limited budget but it was coupled with a strong desire to live near the nightlife and city bustle and a hint of identifying as bohemian artists and then we found what felt like a dream-come-true-loft to rent.

As we lived in our loft longer and longer it started to feel like living small aligns with our values, particularly with considering our global environmental footprint. We ended up spending 10 years in a loft space without a bedroom and loved it and 1.5 years in 800sft with a bedroom that never felt like we belonged. We’ve never come close to wanting to give up living in the city for more space, we love being next to restaurants and busy streets for people watching and concert venues and all the fun things that being in a city allows.

When I think about living small I think about how careful you need to be about collecting things and how comfortable you need to be with letting things go. When I was 5 years old my family had a break in at our property where my dad was building our house. Everything we owned was stored in a shed and when we came one morning it was all gone. The jewelry, the skis, the VHSes, the scarves and even the front door. Everything.

A few years later my mom was carrying our plates out of a potluck and slipped on the ice and broke all of our dishes in one moment.

And I think this could have made it hard to let go of things but instead it taught me to see it all as transient. I treasure things while they can be treasured, but things are just things. They might be here tomorrow but they might not- so I’m mostly ok to let things go.

Dreamy coffee corner with the espresso machine I’ve been eyeing (ed. note)

How would you describe your home style? ex) modern, minimal, bohemian, vintage?

Cariboo Japandi

Outside of pinning everything that falls into Japandi category on Pinterest we’ve been lucky to spend short but incredibly inspiring moments in Denmark and Japan and have wanted to emulate the style and careful beauty and warmth we saw there. However, no matter how hard I try, there’s always something about our place that just ends up feeling like it’s the home I grew up in- on 75acres in the Cariboo (Northern BC)

My dad was a wood shop teacher so I grew up being taught to appreciate wood. y dad and I built a lot of the furniture I have, so actually, a lot of this isn’t just reminiscent of my childhood home, it’s actually the furniture from it.

Is there a piece of furniture or accessory that you couldn't live without that makes living in your space easier?

Our folding table makes changing the configuration of our home easy and despite it not necessarily being the style we’re most drawn to anymore we can’t convince ourselves it would at all be worth it to change it. We don’t have any storage units in our building and so have always had storage under the bed. This bed lifts up with no drawers, so means we can store things like camping equipment, ice skates and Christmas decorations.

Baskets, baskets and more baskets. With lids and without them, they can be on display but filled with messes and no one can tell.

Dining room and then converted to an office space which they take down at the end of the day.

Love this basket-filled entryway! Forgot to move my trench out of the photo.

What is something you love about living small?

We get to invest in most of the things that come into our house. We couldn’t aﬀord the lamps and plates and artwork that we own and cherish if we had to furnish more spaces.

the sheepskin on the office chair is so simple and so smart! (ed. note)

What is something you hate?

There are some things we have to own that are also ugly, like a portable AC conditioner and yoga mats, but there’s nearly no space to hide them away. We’d love if it was easy to tuck things away without worrying about having to play Tetris with all the bits.

We’re both naturally very messy people and in a small space one thing out of place can make the whole home feel like you’re living inside a disastrous explosion so we struggle to keep it feeling beautiful and livable.

I think Small Space-ers need to stick together and share all their best tricks.
Do you have any storage or organizational tips you want to share?
Also, I know you both work from home. Can you share how you make that work?

During the pandemic we both ended up working from home full time in a 650sqft loft-and the first two months were an absolute nightmare, but eventually we got used to it.

Our home became an oﬃce for two, an exercise gym, a movie theatre, a place to call friends and gossip, and basically everything else we wanted to do. This is when we truly learned about the importance of moving the furniture whenever an activity changes, we fold the table and stack the coﬀee tables and within a minute our house is a gym. We take up to 5 minutes and pull out the computer screens, and keyboards and wheel out the ergonomic chair from our bedroom and then our dining room is the oﬃce. The computers go back into the closet and the chair gets a beautiful Icelandic sheepskin thrown on it and now it becomes a cozy journaling corner in our bedroom.

We both agree our bedroom cannot be a place where we stress about work, and we tidy up at the end of each day so that way we get to relax at night without work staring or dinging at us.

If we didn’t move things around we’d have to find a larger space for our lifestyle and that would prevent us from having the budget we want for things like travel.

The other top tip? Noise cancelling headphones. Changed everything for us.

We love to travel but sometimes people say they can’t tell from looking around our space- but that’s ok to me. When I get things from the places I travel I try and make sure they’re very small and/or useful so they end up surprising me with joy each day. A little bone fork in the plant, a special plate, coasters… things when I use I am taken back to the place I bought them but don’t clutter our small place.

Can you share some of your favourite spots that support living small? For me it's nearby parks, community gardens, coﬀee shops, the beach, community centre. love to hear from others.

Having our own outdoor space is the most magical thing in the world, but before that it was any nearby park