Never Too Small's big appeal

Colin Chee's YouTube channel celebrating the beauty of small homes has amassed over three million subscribers

- Teo Kai Xiang

What makes an ideal small home? It has to be like a Swiss Army knife “compact, functional and also well-designed” says home owner Jacqueline Goh as part of a house tour video of her one-bedroom Housing Board flat in Fernvale.

This YouTube video, which has racked up over 900,000 views since it was posted in 2024, spends most of its time on the small touches that make up the 506 sq ft space.

Choosing “side hustle” furniture such as a shoe rack that doubles as a bench. Concealing the original storeroom door behind a full-height cabinet. Making a pull-up bar inconspicuous by adding it below a shelf of the same colour.

“This is not a house, this is a home,” commented one user.

That is the ethos that captures the enduring appeal of Never Too Small, a YouTube channel that has racked up more than three million subscribers since it began in 2017 through intimate videos delving into the story and process behind compact homes.

THE MAN BEHIND NEVER TOO SMALL

Never Too Small’s founder, Mr Colin Chee, 42, says that after eight years of curating homes for the channel, one of his biggest lessons goes against the conventional wisdom of small-space living: Embrace the mess, rather than trying to hide it.

“It’s the items that make a place sing. I call it an organised mess,” he tells The Straits Times on the sidelines of Singapore Design Week, where he is speaking on sustainable and compact living at a dialogue series by the Singapore Science Park.

“There’s a perception that if you keep the visual clutter away, it makes the space feel bigger, but I find that it makes the space harder to manage,” the Malaysian adds.