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# Notes from a small flat in Lisbon
- URL: https://millie.ghost.preview.themeanax.com/notes-from-a-small-flat-in-lisbon/
- Published: 2026-09-27T08:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T05:50:30.000Z
- Description: Seven years, forty-one square metres and one balcony chair: what living small in Graça has quietly taught me.
- Author: Millie Hart
- Tags: Journal, #Import 2026-10-24 10:34

I arrived in Lisbon with two suitcases and a cast-iron pan. The pan was not a practical decision. It weighed more than my coat, my boots and my laptop put together, and the woman at the check-in desk at Manchester Airport looked at it the way you might look at a small dog in a handbag. But it has made every Sunday egg since, so I think it has earned its seat.

Seven years on, I still live in the same flat: top floor, Graça, forty-one square metres if you count the hallway generously. There is a balcony that fits exactly one chair. Here are a few things it has taught me.

## The stairs decide everything

There are ninety-four steps between the street door and mine. I counted them in my first week, out of a mixture of curiosity and grievance, and the number has shaped my life more than any budget.

The stairs are why I buy one bag of shopping at a time from Senhor Abel downstairs, rather than a weekly haul from the big supermarket. They are why I own six plates, not twelve. They are why a new armchair would require a conversation with two neighbours, a rope and possibly the fire brigade.

I used to think of this as a limit. Now I think of it as a filter. If something isn’t worth carrying up ninety-four steps, it probably wasn’t worth buying. (I wrote more about that in [the things I no longer buy](https://millie.ghost.preview.themeanax.com/the-things-i-no-longer-buy/).)

## A kitchen built for one, cooking for eight

My kitchen has two gas rings, an oven that runs hot on the left, and about the worktop space of an ironing board. Once a month I cook supper in it for eight neighbours.

This should not work, and on paper it doesn’t. In practice it means one big pot, one tray in the oven, bread from the bakery on Rua da Graça, and a salad assembled on the balcony chair. Dona Fernanda from the third floor brings her own folding stool and corrects my Portuguese between courses. Nobody has ever complained about the lack of elbow room. They complain about the stairs.

A small kitchen makes you decisive. You can’t make four things at once, so you make one thing properly. Most evenings that’s a soup, or eggs in the cast-iron pan, or rice with whatever Senhor Abel says is good that day.

## The view is the furniture

When I first viewed the flat, the agent apologised for the size and then opened the balcony doors, and I stopped listening to him. From the chair you can see the river, a jumble of terracotta roofs, the castle walls and, if you lean, the yellow flash of the 28 tram turning the corner.

I have stopped trying to fill the rooms. The light does that. In the morning it comes in low and gold across the floorboards; by four in the afternoon it has moved to the kitchen wall and turned the tiles the colour of weak tea. In summer I hang a damp sheet over the doorway and eat dinner outside at ten at night, with the swifts screaming overhead.

> Living small isn’t really about owning less. It’s about noticing what you already have room for.

My sister Rosie visited last spring and said, kindly, that it was “like living in a very nice cupboard.” She’s not wrong. But it’s a cupboard with a view of the Tagus, a neighbour who leaves oranges on my doormat, and a shelf of borrowed books on the landing below.

Seven years in, I don’t want a bigger flat. I’d quite like a second chair for the balcony. There isn’t room for one, and I think that’s probably the point.