Re-imagining Tiny Homes: A Vertical Community Wedged Between Historical Facades

What happens when you take the gap between two old masonry buildings and fill it with an entire community? Not a single apartment, not a co-working pod, but a vertically stacked micro-neighbourhood with rooms for grandparents, children, parents, and strangers, all threaded together by a planted stairwell that pulls daylight deep into the urban block. The result is a compact building that refuses to treat density as a constraint and instead treats it as a social opportunity.

Designed by Daria Borovyk and Kostiantyn Yefymenko, this shortlisted entry for the Nano Nest 2020 competition on uni.xyz tackles one of the sharpest questions facing contemporary housing: how to serve shifting household structures, remote work culture, and the need for genuine community within the smallest possible footprint. Their answer is a four-level infill building that slots between existing historical facades, turning a leftover void into a programmatically rich vertical home.

A Sliver of Light in the Courtyard Block

Seen from above at dusk, the insertion reads as a luminous incision through the courtyard block: a narrow, glowing stairwell that announces its presence without competing with the surrounding masonry. At street level, the facade is a carefully composed panel of transparent glazing and timber blockwork, slender enough to fit between the existing buildings yet assertive enough to invite passersby inside. The transparency at grade is deliberate. The ground floor houses both an office space and a studio apartment for elderly residents, opening directly onto an inner garden that generates a sheltered micro-climate. Rather than turning inward, the building's street face signals civic generosity.

Four Floors, Four Distinct Rhythms of Life

The section drawing and exploded axonometric reveal the project's core logic: each of the four levels serves a specific demographic and activity, yet the central staircase and planted voids stitch them into a continuous spatial experience. The ground floor pairs work with accessible elderly housing. The first floor operates as a communal hub, with an open kitchen, dining area, and living room designed to foster the kind of casual, spontaneous interaction that most compact housing eliminates. The second floor belongs to children, combining two bedrooms with a climbing wall, a jumping net, and study desks. The third floor is a private parental retreat, with a master bedroom, bathroom, and a lounge that looks down into the light well.

What makes this stacking effective is not just the programme distribution but the way light and greenery move vertically through the section. Strategically placed openings channel daylight to every level, while planted zones soften the interiors and reinforce the biophilic ambition. The building reads less like a stack of apartments and more like a single organism with distinct organs.

Where Climbing Walls Meet Cantilevered Stairs

The interior workspace on the children's floor captures the project's playful pragmatism. A built-in desk sits alongside a climbing wall, with the cantilevered steel staircase visible just beyond. The juxtaposition is telling: serious study infrastructure shares the frame with physical play equipment, acknowledging that children's lives do not sort neatly into work and leisure. The exposed steel stair, meanwhile, acts as both circulation and spatial event, its open treads allowing sightlines and air to pass between floors.

Greenery Under Floating Stairs

At the ground floor, a planted bed sits beneath the floating staircase, bathed in natural light that filters down through the building's central void. The seating area here serves as a threshold between the public street and the private dwelling above, a buffer zone where residents and visitors can pause. The planting is not ornamental. It contributes to the inner garden micro-climate and reinforces the project's argument that even the tightest urban sites can accommodate meaningful green space if the section is designed with intention.

Why This Project Matters

Borovyk and Yefymenko's proposal confronts a reality that most tiny home projects avoid: compact living is not just about fitting one person or one couple into a small box. It is about accommodating the full complexity of multigenerational life, remote work, childcare, and community within a constrained envelope. By programming each floor for a distinct user group while linking them through shared infrastructure, the project models an alternative to both sprawling suburbia and the isolation of conventional micro-apartments.

The mixed-use approach, pairing residential space with a ground floor office, reduces commuting pressure without requiring residents to leave the building. The efficient footprint curbs urban sprawl. And the social design, communal kitchens, transparent facades, shared gardens, rejects the idea that density must come at the cost of connection. In a moment when cities are running out of easy building sites, this project argues persuasively that the gaps between existing buildings are not leftover space but untapped potential for vertical community.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Daria Borovyk, Kostiantyn Yefymenko

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Re-imagining tiny homes by Daria Borovyk, Kostiantyn Yefymenko Nano Nest 2020 (uni.xyz).