I must admit I have a sneaking regard for the renovated flat featured in this story , if only because of its brilliant use of available space.

The small apartment in Fitzroy, Melbourne, has a fold-away kitchen and other features to make the most of the limited space available, such as the slide-away bookcase that looks like it the doubles as a bedroom door.

The design borrows heavily from concepts used in boats, caravans and those trendy tiny houses that we keep hearing about.

The kitchen, by the way, is not the size of a broom cupboard, only useful for re-heating takeaways (regardless of what the picture caption in the original realestate.com.au article says).

In fact, current owner-vendor architect Nicholas Agius says his partner knows her way round a chopping board and she was fine with it.

However, I was wondering if I could cope with all the sliding and folding you’d have to do every day just to make the flat functional. As someone for whom any flat surface is soon adopted for storage, I don’t think I could hack it.

But then I remembered the last flat my partner and I lived in before this one. It had two bedrooms but we used them as offices because we both worked from home but couldn’t do so in the same physical space.

Our solution was to have a fold-down wall-bed in the lounge, aka a Murphy bed, which we would fold up every morning and take down at night. It was a comfortable, full-size queen bed which looked like a cupboard when it was stored away.

The Murphy bed served us well for a couple of years and the minor irritation of having to fold it up and down every day and night was more than compensated for by having all that usable space in which we could work.

By the way, this was before laptops were anything like as sophisticated as they are now; computers were big metal boxes and their monitors were effectively TV sets (and not flat screens, either).

Anyway, we knew it was time to look for somewhere bigger when we met a friend of a friend who asked where we lived.

“Oh, I know that block,” she said. “I’ve heard there are a couple of weirdos in there who sleep on a wall bed in their lounge even though they have two bedrooms. Do you know them?”

We found our current block and bought off the plan – and that’s where the nightmare that begat Flat Chat began. Meanwhile, if all you can afford is a tiny flat, and you need space to work as well as live, think about getting a wall bed.

You can rest assured there are at least two people who won’t think you’re a weirdo.

A version of this story went out with last week’s Flat chat newsletter.