For decades, studio apartments have been the workhorses of the New York City housing market: affordable, utilitarian spaces that were the first apartments of countless New Yorkers. Their defining features were their small size and no-frills ethos: a galley kitchen or kitchenette crammed in a corner or a single room, plus a narrow bathroom, all of it made more livable with makeshift room dividers and space-saving strategies like lofted beds. They were the unglamorous postwar, middle-class response to the disappearance of the SRO, the boarding house, and the apartment hotel — the types of singles housing that were largely legislated out of existence during the 1950s. Even for studios in luxury buildings, the grandeur rarely extended beyond the lobby: The real luxury was living alone.
More recently, however, a new type of studio has come to dominate the rental market. Its hallmarks are a full-size kitchen with high-end, full-size appliances; a spacious, spalike bathroom; an in-unit washer and dryer; and a single exposure with a giant window or wall of windows. With so much space given over to the kitchen, the bathroom, and the one big window, the living space itself may be somewhat ill-suited to living — not quite large enough to fit a queen bed, a full-size sofa, a desk, and a table at which to eat the food prepared in the large, luxurious kitchen. But it looks good. And it almost always comes with access to an array of amenities elsewhere in the building, lending it a sheen of luxury no matter how shoe-box-esque the space.
