From Fixed Rooms to Flexible Apartment Design
Movable room dividers and modular furniture for small spaces describe an approach to domestic interiors where lightweight, reconfigurable elements replace fixed walls, allowing apartments to shift between open-plan and separated layouts so that living, working, hosting, and resting can share the same compact footprint without permanent renovation or structural change. This isn’t a stylistic fad; it is a direct challenge to the century-old model of housing organized as a succession of specialized rooms connected by corridors. When a home is treated as an infrastructure for coexistence rather than a container of functions, every panel and cabinet becomes a way to tune climate, intimacy, and shared life. In tight urban apartments, clinging to rigid bedrooms-and-corridor logic is less about comfort than nostalgia. The future of adaptable living solutions is fluid, renter-friendly interior design that can evolve as quickly as the people and pets who live there.
TAKK: Life After Rooms in Everyday Homes
Barcelona and New York-based studio TAKK, founded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño, treats the standard apartment plan as a historical accident, not a natural law. Their work, including curating the Catalan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025, argues that fixed rooms and corridors quietly organize power: they can block cross-ventilation, enforce uniform conditioning of an entire dwelling, and encode hierarchies between activities and occupants. More pointedly, they determine whose care work is visible, which family structure seems normal, and even which species belong indoors. For intergenerational households, friends living together, and people sharing homes for economic or social reasons, this is a bad fit. Privacy, in TAKK’s flexible apartment design, exists in gradients rather than behind a single door; functions can overlap; parts of a home become more or less inhabitable depending on season, temperature, or time of day. Designing a dwelling becomes “designing the conditions from which other ways of living together can emerge”—an ethos perfectly aligned with modular furniture small spaces need.
CASA NM3: When Furniture Becomes Architecture
CASA NM3 arrives in Milan during Salone del Mobile 2026 as a controlled rethinking of the domestic interior, building a home without fixed walls. Instead of enclosure, NM3 uses a system of movable partitions that outline four rooms without fully defining them, creating a space that holds together without relying on permanence and where boundaries shift and the idea of the room becomes fluid. Within this framework, furniture stops behaving like isolated pieces and starts operating as systems: the NM25 and NM26 series introduce a fully modular approach that extends into kitchens, desks, and other elements. Stainless steel, left untreated and precise, sets a light, open, responsive structure, ideal for movable room dividers and adaptable living solutions that can be repositioned with minimal effort. NM3 is clear: once a product can perform different functions and generate multiple typologies through a single underlying logic, it has crossed the line from object to architecture. For cramped apartments, that shift is everything.
Renter-Friendly Interiors: Systems, Not Makeovers
The most radical aspect of this movement is that it is renter-friendly interior thinking at its core. CASA NM3 shows how a home can be outlined by movable partitions rather than fixed walls, so boundaries can be redrawn without touching the structure—exactly what renters need. Modular furniture small spaces use can now function as systems capable of different roles and typologies through one structural logic, letting residents slide from studio-like openness to compartmentalized calm in minutes. According to NM3, objects become architecture when conceived with coherent structural and functional autonomy across different scales. That means a stainless steel shelving unit can be a room divider, work desk, and kitchen frame depending on how you deploy it. TAKK’s idea that a home is “an infrastructure for coexistence” rather than a static layout dovetails neatly here: flexible apartment design is no longer the privilege of those who can afford renovations, but a toolkit of movable room dividers and modular systems anyone can rearrange.
Eclectic Lives Need Flexible Architecture
What keeps this approach from feeling like a clinical showroom is its embrace of eclecticism. CASA NM3 includes objects from real homes; an abstract environment becomes marked, almost “contaminated,” by real life. Personal items from a private bedroom are brought in to give the space the qualities of a real home, proving that stainless steel structures and movable room dividers are not enemies of warmth but frames for it. Over time, these perfectly functional objects become part of daily routines and personal worlds. TAKK sees the house as unfinished in a useful sense: less a prescription for daily life than a framework capable of accommodating its inevitable messiness. Designing a home is no longer about counting bedrooms but about deciding which relationships to facilitate, which forms of care to make visible, and which new forms of coexistence to make possible. In that light, modular systems that welcome personal clutter are not a compromise—they are the most honest adaptable living solutions we have.
