The Borrowed Corner: A Reading Nook for Small Apartments

You do not need a room; you need a corner

Let us retire the objection before it settles in: my apartment is too small for a reading nook. No apartment is too small for a reading nook, because a nook is not a room. It is a corner with a job. And here is the part the spare-room owners will not enjoy: small homes make better nooks. In a large house a reading corner competes with six other destinations. In a small apartment, a well-made corner becomes the best seat within thirty feet by default, and the boundary between nook and not-nook, which does all the real work, is easier to draw when there is less territory to negotiate.

Finding the corner

The corner already exists. Every small apartment has square footage going unused out of habit. Candidates, in rough order of promise:

The bedroom's dead angle

Most bedrooms have one: the angle past the dresser, the gap beside the wardrobe, holding a laundry chair or nothing at all. It is quiet, it is away from the television, and it is available tonight.

Behind or beside the sofa

The sofa usually floats with dead water behind or beside it. A chair and lamp tucked there face away from the screen, which is half the battle won by geometry alone.

The window that never became a window seat

You know the one. It has a radiator or a deep sill and a view nobody uses. A chair pulled to it is nine tenths of a window seat at none of the carpentry.

The wide hallway nobody uses

The odd generous hallway or landing, too narrow for furniture, allegedly. A slim chair and a wall lamp disagree.

Making the boundary

In a small space the boundary is everything, because the nook must be a different place from the room it lives in, while sharing its walls. Three tools, cheap to free. A rug the size of the nook and no larger: a small rug under the chair reads as territory, whereas a room-sized rug reads as flooring. The lamp's pool of light: at evening, the lit circle is a wall for all practical purposes, and the warm pool around the chair is simply elsewhere. And a plant or a screen as the gentle door: one tall plant beside the chair, or a folding screen if you have one, finishes the sentence. This part of the room is spoken for.

Furniture that earns its footprint

The chair that fits

Measure the corner before anything else. A small chair that fits its corner beats a grand chair that fights it; an armchair jammed into a space it overwhelms makes the whole apartment feel smaller, which is the opposite of the assignment. Compact wingbacks, slipper chairs, and good secondhand occasional chairs are the small nook's natural allies.

The side table that nests or hangs

A nesting table, a wall-mounted shelf at elbow height, or a slim C-table that slides under the chair's arm. The glass and the book need six inches of landing, not a credenza.

Vertical storage

The wall does the shelf's job. One picture-ledge shelf above or beside the chair holds the current book and the two waiting, and takes no floor at all. The rest of the library lives elsewhere; the nook is where you read one book, a principle we defend at length in what a reading nook needs beyond the chair itself.

Light in close quarters

When the floor space is spoken for, go up. A wall-mounted swing-arm lamp beside the chair is the small nook's best friend: perfect position, zero footprint. A clamp lamp on the shelf edge does the same work for a tenth of the price. Warm bulbs, always; the corner should glow, not glare, and it is worth noting that everything a reading nook requires fits in close quarters once the light is solved, because light is the only essential that is fussy about placement.

Keep it from becoming storage

The small nook has one mortal enemy, and it is not square footage. It is the pile. In a small home every empty surface is under constant pressure to hold something, and the nook chair is an empty surface with excellent access. Defend it. The chair holds a throw and, briefly, you. The table holds a glass and a book. Anything else that lands there is moved along at the end of each evening, thirty seconds, no appeals. A nook that stays clear stays used, and a corner that is used every evening is, whatever the floor plan says, the largest room in the house.

— B.