WHEN Dennis Perez plunked his savings on his first home, he knew there wasn’t much he could do with the limited space. He decided to personalize it.

“I couldn’t do much structurally so I tried to put conversation pieces that reflected my personality,” Perez, 29, says of the studio where he has been living the past two years. Not unusual for many successful young Filipino professionals, it was his first time to live alone. He has always lived in his parents’ Manila home.

The entire unit is 44 sq m, and for what he paid for it, Perez knew it was a steal considering the high-rise living rates in Makati’s business district.

In the living area, he had custom-built floor cabinets that double as storage space and entertainment and gaming console table (he’s a gaming addict). On opposite ends of a massive flat-screen TV are shelves displaying knickknacks and framed photos: matryoshka dolls from Russia, a tennis ball from the US Open, vintage die-cast metal robots from his seventh and eighth birthdays, an African mask, a Japanese doll.

As his job requires frequent travels—he’s brand manager of Dove in Unilever—each destination is remembered with a single memento (only one; he dislikes clutter), displayed beside his snapshot from that place.

Perez, a tennis player and fan since childhood, displays tennis books, DVDs and childhood photos on the court. His other hobby is lomography, so one corner displays a lomo camera and films.

People place

In one cabinet is a small collection of art film DVDs. One Wednesday a month, he hosts movie night with friends. “My place is small but there’s always a lot of people here,” he says, amused. “It’s near the ‘gimmick’ places, and they say it’s warm and cozy.”

Perez shuns enclosed spaces, so he installed sliding doors to separate his sleeping area from the rest of the unit, while making sure the doors were partially made of glass. He doesn’t mind that guests spill into his bedroom, and onto the mini terrace where he has barstools and a table with an ashtray for smoking friends. Even his cupboards are of glass. “It means I have to be extra neat, but that’s okay. I want things to be transparent.”

A neat freak, Perez makes his bed as soon as he gets up. “I clean by myself. I’m OC (obsessive-compulsive),” he says with a laugh. “If you live in a small space, you should never leave a room cluttered.”

When he moved in, he made sure he had enough built-in storage space. He had cabinets and shelves built over his bed for books, and a built-in worktable and an overhead shelf right next to his custom wardrobe across his bed. In the living room is an overhead shelf ready for use.

Knickknack

Perez is a self-described knickknack junkie who frequents Cubao Expo. To make room for his souvenir collection, he installed mini shelves in the kitchenette-dining area where a bar used to be. It took up so much space, he says, and the new, streamlined structure creates a visual divide that separates his mess area from the living room.

He says the only thing that came with the unit was the drop ceiling, where now hangs a lamp from Ikea, and a small vanity mirror by the main door. It’s where he put small Christmas trinkets in December in lieu of a tree that takes up space.

“I was lucky because my dad is an architect.” An interior designer helped fine-tune his choices.

At Market! Market!, he found a small L-shaped lime sofa. Behind it is a mirror to give the illusion of depth to his living area. All wood used is in the same dark finish.

“I love it here,” he says of this independence. “It made me realize the things I used to take for granted. I used to ignore my mom’s pleas to save on electricity and all that stuff. Now that I pay for everything, I finally understand what she meant.”