This 330-Square-Foot Chinatown Rental Was Elegantly Transformed With a $5,000 Budget

AD’s Small Spaces series is a celebration of small homes—1,000-square-feet or fewer!—with big design ideas. From Manhattan apartments to Milanese micro-homes, each one is proof that you don’t need a sprawling space to show off your personal style.Dating a design content creator has its perks. Phoebe Kut, who has nearly 200K followers on her TikTok account, @pbjdesign, used all the tips and tricks she shares online to completely upgrade Anton Fredriksson's 330-square-foot New York City rental on a tight budget. She incorporated DIY projects, shopped secondhand, and chose multipurpose pieces to pull off the transformation for just $5,000.Fortunately, Kut had a beautiful canvas to work with. The compact one-bedroom apartment is over a century old, so it boasts original brick walls, exposed wood beams, ornately carved window trim, and high ceilings. “It has that historic charm,” she says. “I believe the building dates back to the early 1900s. The kitchen and bathroom were already renovated.”“The black-and-white photo behind the sofa is of the apartment building, taken in the 1900s,” Kut shares. “It used to be a dentist’s office, this unit.” The first thing Kut did was warm up the living room by painting the wall a muted olive tone, Texas Sage by Benjamin Moore. “Before, everything was white, so we painted that accent wall just to give it some color and character,” she says. “Green is very cozy and homey, but we didn’t want a really dark shade because it would make the space feel a little bit enclosed. This is a medium, balanced sage.”For the sofa, Kut opted for a modular pale gray Burrow number that tucks into the corner for comfortable lounging and doubles as a twin bed for overnight visitors. “[My partner] wanted to be able to have guests over,” she says. “In New York, there’s always people wanting to crash and you’re hosting them, so that was a specific thing that we did end up finding a really great piece for.”Since storage is limited, Kut hung a coat rack on the wall outside the bedroom.