With No Buckeye Barns, It Makes You Think

I can remember the Chinese professors who visited my home as a child. After we showed them around, they asked how many families live here? We thought our house wasn't so big for a family of seven, but they saw things from an entirely different perspective.


Moscow real estate prices are famously among the most expensive in the world. Today, an average square meter of Moscow residential real estate will run you roughly $4000 (this figure swings, mainly upward, on more variables than I care to mention). Suddenly, the economics force you to carefully consider how you will put that pricey spot of real estate to use.


This makes for an interesting formula: expensive real estate = less space = more thinking about how to use said space. Cities generally include some of the most expensive real estate and therefore subsequently the most consideration of space saving solutions and thought of what is really necessary to buy and store and what is not a need at all.


The Ikea store in Moscow has taken this situation to heart as evidenced in their display titled “My 25 square meters”. In this display the Swedish furniture giant shows how its furniture and space saving devices make a 25 square meter apartment comfortable and certainly not devoid of storage.


Of course, expensive cities have no corner on the market for valuing space as I recently noted in a visit to a Nenets' chum not far from Salekhard, in northern Siberia. The chum, roughly 20 feet in diameter could have slept 15 easily. However, there were no couches, refrigerators (for obvious reasons), closets, and so on. The TV and DVD player run off a generator in the corner did betray a potential future need for even the Nenets to consider how to use their precious space.

Our family of six is renting a 100 square meter apartment (roughly 1100 square feet). It really seems quite roomy as our old flat in Perm was 80 square meters. In our current 100 square meters here in Moscow, we home school the children, work (hope to find an office soon), and receive guests, who often comment on how big the apartment feels.


For the cost of this apartment in a back street in Moscow, I could certainly get a huge house back in Ohio, even with plenty of acreage to put up another Buckeye barn in the event my accumulated possessions were greater than the storage space inside the house and I also had too little time for a garage sale.


However, since I'm in Moscow and not Ohio, I think I'll put this expensive floor space to use by allowing it to force me to value the space and think through its best use. Turns out the city will make you think!