Sweden's smallest apartments: 1.9 square metres built to make a point about housing
A Swedish housing developer has built three fully furnished micro-apartments — the smallest just 1.9 square metres, roughly the footprint of a single bed — to show what a 25-year-old can actually afford to buy in Sweden today.
Riksbyggen, a Swedish cooperative housing developer, partnered with creative agency BBDO Nordics to design the three flats, which were announced on 20 August 2026. Each apartment corresponds to a different city: 1.9 square metres for Stockholm, 3.1 square metres for Gothenburg and 4.5 square metres for Umeå. Dezeen
The numbers came from Riksbyggen's square metre index, a tool that calculates how many square metres of housing a young person can afford based on income, property prices and mortgage conditions. The index drew on data from Statistics Sweden (SCB), a government agency, and digital bank Avanza. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Umeå were chosen because they are cities where young people face an especially sharp gap between housing need and housing affordability, BBDO Nordics art director Anton Bolin told Dezeen. Dezeen
Bolin worked with Bengt Svedlund of Stockholm design company Dekormakarna to build the three flats. They were designed to look like typical Swedish homes — proper flooring, wallpaper, furniture — only at an impossibly reduced scale. A visitor could stand at the threshold of the Stockholm flat and see nearly every wall at once.
What makes the campaign land is its tangibility. Sweden's housing affordability problem has been documented in reports and statistics for years. A 1.9-square-metre room with a door and a lamp turns those statistics into something you can stand inside, or rather, something you cannot. The gap between a typical Swedish apartment and these three boxes is the gap the campaign wants people to feel.
The campaign was first announced on 20 August 2026, with coverage in LBBOnline. Dezeen published further details on 26 August 2026, including the specific dimensions and the methodology behind them. LBBOnline
Riksbyggen is one of Sweden's largest housing developers, owned jointly by trade unions and housing cooperatives. Its square metre index is part of a broader advocacy push for policy changes to make housing more accessible to young buyers, according to materials published on the company's website.
