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\n Studios layouts have evolved to include bigger, fancier kitchens and baths in recent years.
\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Graphics: The Dupont, Getty\n <\/p>\n
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 of the 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 \u2014 the singles housing types 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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. Rents have gone up accordingly: The average new-construction studio runs in the mid-to-high $3,000s in Brooklyn and Long Island City, and one to two thousand more in Manhattan. \u201cThe studio of yore is proportional \u2014 small kitchen, small apartment. Now it\u2019s bigger kitchen, more awkward layout, and more expensive,\u201d says Jonathan Miller, of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. \u201cIt\u2019s losing its identity as an affordable-housing alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n A studio kitchen at 25 Water Street, a Financial District office-to-residential conversion, that would not look out of place in a two-bedroom.
\n Photo: Streetsense\n <\/p>\n
And developers are building a lot more studios than they used to \u2014\u00a0in the past decade or so, the percentage of studios in many buildings has doubled, according to Bobby Fijan, a developer<\/a> who also writes extensively about floor plans. Now, studios make up a quarter or more of the units in many New York rental projects. Nationally, that\u2019s true as well. \u201cYou see more and more developers doing 40 percent now,\u201d says Isaac Henderson, a managing director at the Rockefeller Group whose most recent Greenpoint development, the Dupont<\/a>, has a little over 16 percent \u2014 a larger number than Rockefeller Group would have built in the past. And the next project may well have more as \u201call of them have been rented out.\u201d This new type of studio, in other words, is everywhere these days. But how did it end up taking over?<\/p>\n One theory is that studios changed because the renters did. Talking to developers and new development rental brokers, the word \u201csophisticated\u201d comes up a lot \u2014 another way of saying that studio renters these days are older and wealthier than they used to be. There\u2019s are also a lot more of them. About a third of New York City residents live alone (it\u2019s half in Manhattan) and the bulk of them are in their peak earning years, between 35 and 65<\/a>. Unsurprisingly, these older, weather residents don\u2019t want roommates. And they\u2019re willing to pay for the pricier studios, says Henderson, especially with more wealthy households opting to rent<\/a> rather than buy. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this for 25 years, and the design and level of finishes have consistently gone up: The refrigerators have gotten bigger; the stoves have gotten bigger.\u201d Rebecca Epstein, managing director of residential leasing at Two Trees, has been seeing this too. Studio residents are \u201casking for full-size dishwashers.\u201d For developers, there\u2019s also a clear incentive to build more studios: They rent for more per square foot than larger units and also tend to rent faster than any other type of apartment. (The opposite is true in the sales market \u2014 buyers pay a premium for larger apartments, so developers rarely build new studio condos these days besides staff units in ultraluxury buildings.)<\/p>\n \n A studio apartment at the Dupont in Greenpoint. The rise of double-loaded corridors means deeper floor plates with single exposures. Windows tend to be large focal points of the apartments. At the Dupont in Greenpoint, where the studios rent in the low-to-high $3,000s, the appliances are Bosch, all the stoves are induction, and everything in the kitchen is panelized \u2014 that is, hidden behind cabinetry, so tenants don\u2019t have to stare at the stainless-steel hulk of a refrigerator whenever they\u2019re home. At 25 Water Street<\/a>, a Financial District office-to-residential conversion that\u2019s the largest such project in the country, the appliances are also panelized and there\u2019s recessed lighting throughout \u2014 a high-end touch that\u2019s about as far as you can get from boob lights, that staple of cheap rentals everywhere. Some studios even have double vanities in the bathrooms. \u201cFive or six years ago, you would not typically have seen those in studios; now you\u2019re seeing more and more of them,\u201d says Sarah Patton, the co-head of Compass Development Marketing Group whose team is heading up leasing at 25 Water. Because of the building\u2019s deep office floor plates, some of the studios are as large as one-bedrooms, with windowless interior rooms marketed as home offices, so it\u2019s conceivable that some will be taken by couples. They\u2019re priced like one-bedrooms, too: many rent for upward of $6,000 a month. Still, one broker I spoke with called the idea of putting a double vanity in a studio \u201ctotally insane.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether or not renters are using two sinks and their big, fancy kitchens for more than decanting Seamless orders is kind of beside the point \u2014 they\u2019re a luxury signifier. \u201cThere\u2019s been an escalation of finishes overall,\u201d says Justin Elghanayan, the president of major rental developer Rockrose. \u201cLuxury housing is getting more luxurious.\u201d A proportional kitchen may be more practical and elegant, but Americans \u201cdon\u2019t really understand what a small apartment is supposed to look like,\u201d says Stephen Jacob Smith, the founder of the Center for Building<\/a>, a nonprofit that conducts research on building codes and standards and advocates for change. \u201cA tiny French studio that\u2019s 250 or 300 square feet would have a two-burner induction cooktop and a mini-fridge.\u201d Most manufacturers don\u2019t make smaller appliances for the U.S. market, either (besides things like dorm-room microwaves and mini-fridges), because there isn\u2019t much demand. For developers, it\u2019s also simply easier to buy \u2014 and maintain \u2014 the same set of appliances for the entire building. If a stove breaks, they can sub it out, often with one from a vacant unit in the same building.<\/p>\n But Elghanayan doesn\u2019t think renter preference is what\u2019s driving the lopsided layouts. He points instead to federal fair-housing laws<\/a> passed in 1991 that mandated that all new housing meet accessibility requirements, like having certain turning radii in the kitchen, bathroom, and foyer \u2014 modifications that allow wheelchair users to live in them comfortably. James Davidson, a partner at SLCE Architects who\u2019s been designing studios for 40 years, agrees: \u201cStudios are now 10 to 15 percent larger because you need larger foyers, larger kitchens, and larger bathrooms.\u201d And since rents are high because of new construction costs, and the cost of those big kitchens and baths, you may as well make the units as fancy as possible, creating an ever-escalating feedback loop.<\/p>\n Smith also believes we have the rise of the double-loaded corridor to thank for these layouts \u2014 that is, a tower with apartments on either side of a hallway, which became prevalent in New York because of zoning, leading to apartments that are \u201cgiant bulky rectangles with less natural light.\u201d Prewar apartment buildings were often in H, T, U configurations, with courtyards and a lot more exterior wall space, offering lots of places to put windows. But the double-loaded corridor building means dealing with a single exposure and deep floor plates for everything that\u2019s not a corner unit. An increasingly common way to address the challenges of using all that interior space and meeting accessibility requirements is by putting a kitchen (and sometimes the bathroom as well) right off the front door instead of a foyer, which has the added bonus of separating the kitchen from the sleeping area. (Another way to address the problem \u2014 widening the apartment to make the studio more of a square \u2014 makes it much larger, and therefore more expensive.) But the layout isn\u2019t really ideal. \u201cNot everyone likes having a kitchen and a bathroom that are part of your entryway,\u201d says Jules Garcia, an agent at Coldwell Banker Warburg. \u201cYou also need to make sure the apartment has good ventilation when you have the kitchen and bathroom across from each other, or you could end up with some smell transfer.\u201d<\/p>\n In a way, the new luxury studios hearken back to an earlier era \u2014 to the large, graciously laid-out studios of the 1920s and \u201930s, which were a niche product intended for wealthy bachelors. The original studios, built around the turn of the 20th century, like the ones at the Hotel des Artistes, were even more upscale \u2014\u00a0live\/work spaces with double-height ceilings and huge windows, purpose-built for gentleman artists. Real-estate developers then appropriated the term to make one-room apartments seem more bohemian and appealing. One major difference, however, is that those spacious prewar studios, with their separate foyers and kitchens \u2014 many of the bathrooms even had their own foyers, nooks off the main room, often with a linen closet as well \u2014 lent themselves to longer stays. Today\u2019s studio is a strange combination of the luxurious bachelor pad and the bleak, middle-class apartments that emerged after World War II: an efficiency with a veneer of luxury.<\/p>\n It\u2019s maybe not surprising, then, that even as studios rent faster than any other type of apartment, they also turn over faster, which Fijan believes is due, at least in part, to their design. \u201cAs soon as someone can get something better, they move out,\u201d Fijan says. \u201cI would describe it as shortsighted.\u201d<\/p>\n One renter I spoke with moved from a studio in a Brooklyn carriage house to a \u201cluxury\u201d studio in a nearby tower after winning a housing lottery. Her carriage-house studio was about the same price and \u201cinfinitely cooler,\u201d she says. \u201cIt had all these built-ins, a loft bed, a little kitchen off the main space, and skylights which you would never get in a new development.\u201d But the heat was balky and the situation potentially precarious in the way it is with any small-time landlord: If and when they decided to cash out on their investment, she\u2019d almost certainly have to leave. So she traded the better-designed space for the new one.<\/p>\n But when the pandemic started, she realized just how ill-suited the new space was for anything more than a crash pad. It had a tendency to overheat on sunny days because of the big window (which could only be cracked open a smidge), and the L-shaped kitchen was in the middle of the living space, which she wouldn\u2019t have minded if the room weren\u2019t also her bedroom. She also hated her entire life being on full display during Zooms. \u201cThere are better studio layouts, with alcoves and sunken areas, but most now are just one square space, and no one wants that unless they\u2019re 25 and have a really active social calendar,\u201d she says. When a coveted one-bedroom opened up in the building, she jumped on it.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the trick to living in, even loving, one of these new studios? Not spending too much time in it seems to help, which is very much possible given the cornucopia of amenities that developers are offering these days. Jake McFadden, who\u2019s in his 30s and owns the med spa Forbidden Well<\/a>, thought he might be done with studio living before he moved into 25 Water. He\u2019s lived in a number of studios over the years, most recently a sublet in a 1970s Murray Hill tower that came with basic perks \u2014 a doorman, a gym \u2014 but they weren\u2019t enough to make up for the apartment being small and dated. The $4,100-a-month studio he lives in now is amply sized, with an alcove that fits a king-size bed and \u201cfeels like living in a hotel suite,\u201d he says approvingly. But he says he spends most of his waking hours at home in 25 Water\u2019s amenity spaces, especially the co-working room and gym. (There are also basketball and pickleball courts, two swimming pools, golf simulators, bowling, and a spa.) \u201cI\u2019m only really in my apartment when I\u2019m sleeping,\u201d he says. \u201cI treat it like a bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/a3d020fd1fe493bcee487df0776f724e6f-The-Dupont---Studio-1.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Joel Pitra at DDReps\n <\/p>\n