This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
When filmmaker Colin Chee finally bought a home of his own, budget constraints didn’t allow him to hire a professional to help him redesign the space – so he began interviewing local architects in hope of picking up some valuable advice along the way.
Little did he know, this wouldn’t just help him furnish his 37-square-meter studio apartment – it would become the beginning of Never Too Small, an unexpectedly popular YouTube channel that later evolved into a media company dedicated to small-footprint design and living.
Today, Never Too Small also publishes beautifully designed magazines and coffee table books, inspiring a global community to embrace smarter, more sustainable ways of living in the city.
What’s your background, and what led you to launch Never Too Small?
I’m originally from Malaysia, and I came to Melbourne when I was 21 to study. I majored in filmmaking and after uni, I started working as a filmmaker at a video production company called New Mac in 2008. We did everything from TV commercials to documentaries, branded content, and yeah, the occasional boring corporate video too.
Since I was the only one from my family here, I had to rely heavily on myself. I worked hard and saved up to buy my first home. Around 2013, I finally had enough to get an apartment. I was originally looking for a one-bedroom place, but after the 2008 financial crisis, prices had shot up. I couldn’t afford a one-bed, so I ended up buying a 37-square-meter studio apartment right in the Melbourne CBD – off the plan, since that was cheaper.
But when I moved in, it was nothing like the glossy renders. It felt dark and cramped, with way too much storage and hardly any space to actually live. I wanted to hire a designer or architect to help me rework the layout, but quickly realized how expensive that would be in Australia. So I tried figuring it out myself, starting with ripping everything out and putting in a wooden floor. That was my reset.
I went online looking for inspiration – YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest – but most of the small space content didn’t really look appealing to me. I wanted to hear more from the designers themselves. That’s when I thought, hey, I’ve got filmmaking skills – why not start a YouTube channel where I interview architects about small space design? And maybe I’d get some free advice along the way.
So that’s how the YouTube channel started. In the beginning, I didn’t have any footage, so I reached out to about 20 local architects who’d done small apartments. Only one – Ben from Studio Edwards – got back to me and said I could film a project of his called Microlux. That became the very first Never Too Small video in July 2017.
I filmed that, then another, and a few more – four in total. Then I kind of left it alone to see what would happen. I didn’t touch the channel for five months, but the views just kept ticking up. My boss, James McPherson, saw the potential and told me I could use company resources if I wanted to make more. So I kept going. By episode 10, we had 60,000 subscribers, which was kind of wild.
For the first year, it was a total one-man show. I did everything – pre-production, filming, editing, uploading, and managing the channel; later on, our producer Lindsay joined, allowing me to focus on the video production. Any money the channel made went straight back into travel and filming. I started going from Melbourne to Sydney, then to Europe – my partner is from there – so every time we visited, I’d line up projects to shoot. By episode 25 or so, we’d hit 100,000 subscribers, around early 2019.
That’s when James and I had a proper conversation and decided to take Never Too Small seriously. In September 2019, we registered it as an official business. But three months later, COVID hit. International travel was off the table.
During lockdown, we started collaborating with other YouTubers to create a kind of lifestyle version of Never Too Small – remote shoots where they filmed themselves and sent us the footage. We edited it into a 20-minute format for the channel. That’s how we kept things going during the pandemic.
As the founder, how has Never Too Small shaped your own way of living, or seeing the world?
It all started because I didn’t have the money to properly design my own place. When I launched Never Too Small, I’d never studied architecture – I didn’t know much about floor plans, ventilation, lighting, any of that. But through all the interviews and videos I made, I ended up learning a lot about interior design and architecture in a pretty short time.
One of the biggest realizations for me was that most people who live in small spaces – myself included – don’t necessarily choose to live small. It’s often because of budget constraints. Buying or renting a smaller place is more affordable, but hiring an architect to make it truly livable is often out of reach financially. So people turn to magazines, YouTube, Instagram – whatever they can find – for inspiration. That’s where Never Too Small found its niche: it became a space focused solely on small-space design, and through it, I got to see how architects approach compact living without sacrificing lifestyle.
Over time, I picked up a considerable amount of knowledge and practical tips just by listening to these designers. Eventually, I was lucky enough to buy a slightly bigger place – 40 square meters, which is just three square meters more than my old studio. I joked with my friends that I’d upgraded!
When we bought the new place, I told my partner, “Let’s design the whole apartment on a $5,000 budget.” “Are you crazy? – was the reply – you can spend $1,000 just on a fridge!” But I was determined – we could make it work using secondhand stuff, Facebook Marketplace, and some DIY. I really wanted to put all the knowledge I’d gained from Never Too Small to the test. And we did it. It became a kind of personal challenge, and a way to prove that good design doesn’t have to be expensive. You just need to be resourceful.
What’s an unexpected lesson that you’ve learned from running Never Too Small, beyond the actual topic of design and interior design?
There’ve been so many unexpected lessons, honestly. One of the biggest lightbulb moments for me was realizing how much urban design impacts small space living, especially when you live in the city. Your apartment might be tiny, but the city becomes your backyard. So, how the city is designed plays a massive role in how comfortably you live in a small space.
Beyond the technical stuff, one of the most surprising lessons came from talking to people, not just architects. Hearing how design decisions actually affect their day-to-day lives has been incredibly eye-opening. Design doesn’t make life happen, but it enables it. It creates the space for things to happen.
I remember this one couple in Amsterdam – both of them are on the autism spectrum – and they told me how, in their old home, the grey, sterile design made them feel disconnected. It didn’t feel like home. So when they moved, they decided to redesign the space themselves. They used a lot of color and thought deeply about how each element made them feel. They taught me about how textures and colors can be calming or energizing, how a certain kind of countertop or sofa fabric can create a sense of safety. That conversation really stuck with me, and since then, I’ve been digging into color psychology, especially in relation to neurodiversity. I found out that pinks and lilacs, for example, can create a sense of calm, while muted greens help people feel grounded.
Another lesson came from traveling and filming homes in places like Italy and Spain. I noticed how architects there often work with the existing structure rather than tearing it all down. They preserve historical elements – like original tile floors or wall textures – and then layer in modern interventions. It’s this beautiful blend of respecting the past while adapting to present needs. That kind of thinking really changed how I see renovation. It’s not always about starting fresh – it’s about telling a story through space.
Something else that surprised me was what people actually want from their homes. We often assume the biggest issues in small apartments are things like storage or kitchen size. But when I ask our YouTube community what they struggle with most, I get very different answers. What a lot of people really miss is a space for hobbies – a place to do things that are “in progress.” Maybe it’s working on a craft project or building something. You don’t want to pack it all up every time, you just want a small corner where you can come back to it tomorrow. That’s a kind of space most modern floor plans don’t really allow for.
It made me rethink how we design small apartments. Right now, especially in the West, we design homes that basically tell people where to eat, sleep, and cook – and that’s it. But people’s lives are more complex than that. What if we designed apartments with flexible layouts – movable walls or reconfigurable zones – so people could adapt the space to their needs? A musician or artist might need a larger living space to practice or work. Someone who just wants to unwind after a long day might be fine with a smaller living room but wants a cozy nook for working from home.
We might not be able to change the size of an apartment, but we can rethink the layout. That flexibility could make a huge difference – not just for the first person who lives there, but for future occupants too. It reduces the need for constant renovations, makes the space more sustainable, and supports a variety of lifestyles.
Over the years, how has the vision behind Never Too Small evolved, both creatively and culturally?
I think the core vision has always stayed the same: we want to show that compact living can still mean high-quality living. It can be sustainable, thoughtful, and enriching to your lifestyle. But what has evolved is the way we tell these stories.
At the beginning, the focus was mostly on architects explaining their designs. But over time, we’ve started including more voices, especially the people actually living in these small spaces. We talk to them about how they organize their homes, what kinds of clever solutions they use – sometimes it’s as simple as an IKEA hack or a budget-friendly idea that just makes life easier or better. These lived experiences add a whole new layer to the story.
Another shift came from travel. I’ve been lucky through my work to meet amazing people all over the world – people with totally different perspectives and ways of solving design challenges. A few years ago, I went to a conference in Thailand and met this young local architect named Chad, who was a fan of Never Too Small. He took me to see his work, which really blew me away. He was documenting the clever, everyday designs that local people were creating, especially those in lower-income urban communities.
We walked through a slum area in Bangkok, and I saw things that completely changed how I think about design. One example I’ll never forget: there was this small shop run by an older woman. Her son, who works in construction, had made a louvered window from discarded materials. During the day, she would fold it down and use it to display snacks. At night, it folded back up and locked. It was ingenious. He built it all from construction waste people had thrown away.
And that’s the thing – when people have fewer resources, they often come up with the most brilliant ideas. Like in that same neighborhood, people would take broken chairs and combine them into a usable chair. Then they’d weave the seat using plastic string, applying traditional techniques. From the outside, it might look like junk, but the thought and creativity behind it are extraordinary.
It made me question how we define sustainability. A lot of the time, we focus on highly engineered products – recycled plastic panels that can cost hundreds of dollars. But for most people, that’s not affordable. What if true sustainability isn’t always about the materials, but about the design? About creating things that can adapt, evolve, and last longer.
That’s something I’ve been exploring more, especially through the idea of multifunctional furniture. Like, what if a chair could become a coffee table? Maybe you need it as a chair now, but in three or five years, your life has changed, and it becomes something else. That’s sustainability too – designing with flexibility and longevity in mind.
Last year, for Melbourne Design Week, we did an exhibition around that idea. I invited 11 designers and architects we’ve featured before and gave them a very specific brief: design multifunctional pet furniture for small spaces. But here’s the twist – it had to serve a second life after your pet passes away. Most pet homes end up in landfills when they’re no longer needed. But if you design something that can later become a bench, a coffee table, or storage, it stays useful.
We also made it a technical challenge. Each designer had to work within a single sheet of plywood – 1.2 by 2.4 meters – and it all had to be cut using CNC machines locally in Melbourne. That way, the designer could be based in Spain, the UK, or Singapore, but the furniture could still be built locally, just by accessing a CNC machine. That’s another way we’re thinking about the future – how design can be global but production can be local and accessible.
Never Too Small started as a digital project. What made you decide to move into print, first with a book, then with a quarterly magazine?
Before COVID, we’d already talked about one day doing a magazine or book. Then, right before everything shut down, publisher Paul McNally from Smith Street Books messaged me on LinkedIn and asked if I wanted to publish a book. I told him, “I can’t write,” and he said, “That’s fine – you can get someone to write it based on your interviews.”
So that’s what we did. We picked 30 of the best projects we’d filmed and turned them into a book. Two of my colleagues wrote it using my interviews, and we collected images directly from the architects. At first, we thought it’d just be a nice ego boost – something to sell on our website, maybe a sale or two a week. But to our surprise, it really took off. People were actually into it. The book even became the #1 architecture book on Amazon for a while. It showed us there’s a real market for physical content, even in this digital world.
The magazine was also a long time in the making. We were already talking about the idea in the early days of Never Too Small, and it came from wanting to share more than just compact living spaces. When we talk to architects, they often share brilliant insights – not just about the apartments they design, but also about urban planning, furniture, materials, and broader design philosophies. Artists and makers also have so much to contribute. But we realized early on that our YouTube audience comes specifically to see small spaces. That’s what they expect and what they want. So if we introduce interrelated content – like documentaries on design theory or city planning – it just doesn’t perform as well. And we respect our audience’s expectations.
So the magazine became a way to explore those wider conversations while catering to a different audience. It gave us a platform to go deeper into urban design, art, radical thinking, and even essays from writers who reflect on what small living means from cultural or philosophical perspectives. These are stories that are much easier to tell in print than through video, especially because making videos is expensive and time-consuming. We simply can’t turn every great idea into a film.
In a way, the magazine completes our identity as a publication. Now we’re not just a YouTube channel – we’re a full publishing company. We have books, social media, video content, and now a magazine that allows us to cover more ground.
What’s been really interesting is that the magazine has brought in a whole new audience. A lot of the people who read it don’t even know about our YouTube channel. Like, on our recent trip to Europe, we met people who were familiar with the magazine but had no idea we also make videos. So the print side isn’t just an extension of what we do – it’s also its own universe, with its own readership and reach.
What’s the main challenge you had to face at the very beginning of your publishing journey?
None of us had ever worked in magazine publishing before, so we were completely new to it. But we were excited to take on the challenge. Thankfully, we had some amazing help early on: the two founders of Lunch Lady Magazine, Lara and Lou, became our mentors in a way. They guided us through the process of how to make a magazine, step by step. Lara is still our graphic designer for the magazine, which is really great.
One of the biggest challenges has been shipping – it’s incredibly costly and still something we’re trying to manage better. Producing a print magazine is expensive. You have to pay writers, photographers, and then there are all these hidden costs: printing, distribution, website maintenance, taxes, and paying someone to manage operations. It adds up fast.
How do you see Never Too Small in five years? Do you see the magazine, and maybe also the coffee table books evolving?
Let’s start with the coffee table books. The first two were very focused on design: each featured 30 projects with floor plans and essays about each space. But if we do another book, I’d really like to shift the focus more toward human stories, not just design stories.
What I’ve come to realize is that design on its own isn’t enough anymore. Yes, a beautiful floor plan and clever spatial solutions matter, but I’m now more interested in how the design actually holds up in everyday life. Like, how does a space perform when it’s lived in – when the bed isn’t always made, or the kitchen’s a bit messy? That kind of reality is important to me. You walk into someone’s home, and it might not be pristine, but it still feels great – that’s the sign of truly resilient, thoughtful design.
I also love when a design is flexible enough that you can bring in a random chair you found on the street, and it still fits the space. That kind of layered, lived-in look is something I think people are really embracing now, especially after COVID, when we all started investing more emotionally and physically in our homes. People are more into secondhand furniture, quirky objects, hobbies, collections – things that make a space personal.
So if we do a third book, it will be much more about that blend of design and lifestyle – how people really live. I think we were a bit too focused on aesthetics before.
As for the next five years, well, there’s been some talk about a TV show, maybe even a documentary series. One idea I’m really passionate about is tracing the history of apartment living. A lot of people think living in apartments is a modern trend, but it actually goes way back, like the Roman insula, or communal circular apartments in China’s Guangzhou region. That history fascinates me, and I haven’t seen it documented in a way that connects to how we live now. I’d love to explore that.
In terms of direction, I don’t think too far ahead – maybe just one or two years at a time. But I do want us to do more real-world events. Our biggest audience is actually in Europe – places like Milan and Madrid – so I’d love to host something there. Right now, we have three million subscribers and hundreds of thousands of followers, but they’re just numbers online. I want to meet them in real life, to really understand our audience and build a stronger community.
After all the spaces and stories you’ve encountered, is there one that has stayed with you in a special way – a project, a person, or a moment you often come back to?
There’s one story I always come back to. It was during COVID in 2020 – I was wearing a mask, shopping in a supermarket, and this gentleman came up to me and asked, “Are you Colin from Never Too Small?” I said yes, and he just started thanking me.
He and his wife had been living in a two-bedroom apartment in the city for 12 years, ever since their son was born. Now their son was turning 13, and the space was starting to feel too small. They were accumulating more things and didn’t know how to make it work anymore. They were seriously considering moving out to the suburbs.
But then, he told me he happened to watch an episode we did on architect Michael Roper’s own apartment in Melbourne. In that space, Michael used floor-to-ceiling shelving and storage hidden behind curtains, so when the curtains were closed, the room looked clean and spacious.
This man was so inspired by that idea that he went to IKEA, bought a few Billy bookcases and a curtain system, and recreated the concept in his own home. He also remembered the advice he got from another video not to use dining chairs that were too tall, because they could clutter the room visually, so he swapped his out for something lower. He said it completely transformed their apartment.
And then, the most amazing part: they decided not to move. They stayed in the city, close to work, in the apartment they already loved – because with a few simple design changes, it suddenly worked for them again.
That moment really stuck with me. It made me realize we were doing more than just showing nice design: we were actually helping people reimagine how they live. We don’t make a ton of money from this, but stories like that make us feel rich in a different way. It gave me a real sense of purpose, knowing that this little channel we started could make a real difference in someone’s life.
And over the years, more people have shared similar stories – emails, comments, messages about how Never Too Small inspired them to stay in their homes, to downsize, to make their space work better. That’s the kind of impact that really stays with you.
Based on your experience, what would you say are three tips on how to make a home look nice and making you feel good when you are there?
If you’d asked me that question five years ago, I probably would’ve said something like: “Paint the floor white, make your room bright,” design-focused advice. But these days, I see the idea of “home” quite differently.
I think the most important thing is not to get too caught up in trends or what’s popular at the moment. Just because everyone is loving Japanese minimalism, for example, doesn’t mean that’s the right style for you. If you genuinely like it, sure, incorporate elements of it. But don’t force yourself into a style just because it’s considered “good design”. You really have to listen to yourself and understand what feels right for you and your life.
Also, I’ve come to realize that a home should be able to handle the everyday mess. It shouldn’t feel like you need to tidy up constantly just to enjoy being in it. Design something that feels comfortable to live in, not just something that looks good in photos.
And I don’t believe small space living means you have to be a minimalist. You can still surround yourself with things you love. You just have to be intentional about what you keep and how you make space for it. If something no longer brings you joy, then maybe it’s time to let it go. But if something makes you happy – even if it’s quirky or doesn’t “match” – it deserves a spot in your home.
Personally, I’ve filled my space with reminders of my own heritage and things that feel valuable and important to me: Asian kitchenware, photos of my family, artwork I’ve collected over time. I even tried being a minimalist once, but honestly, it didn’t make me happy. So I returned to what felt natural to me, and what made the space feel alive.
At the end of the day, what makes a home feel good is really personal. It’s not about copying someone else’s aesthetic – it’s about understanding what makes you feel at peace, inspired, and yourself.
