Extreme Minimalism: 7 People Who Pared All the Way Down Talk Living (Nearly) Furniture-Free

Lizzie Soufleris

Minimalism is not for everyone. Some of us are moved by a magpie-like spirit to collect and weave every possible flea market find into the ever-expanding tapestry of our home furnishings and decor. But long before Marie Kondo, people have been similarly bewitched by a far more ascetic aesthetic. For a certain subset of the population, even items the majority of us would deem total necessities—like a sofa, chairs, or a bed—just don’t spark joy. Those who max out on minimalism to the extent that they find themselves (happily) on the floor can safely be categorized as “extreme minimalists.”

We typically associate minimalism with ultra-restrained design, but for many furniture-free extreme minimalists, it’s a philosophy and a lifestyle. The sources tapped for this story have chosen to rid themselves of furniture for reasons that have nothing to do with looks. In the Cornwall, UK, abode of endurance athlete, natural lifestyle coach, and author Tony Riddle, home decor aesthetics follow kinesthetics.

When Riddle operated a pilates studio in London about three decades ago, his clients would come in with the exact same injuries and pain complaints, only achieving temporary symptom relief through the practice. The usual suspects? Neck, lower back, and knees, which Riddle understood as areas that should be strong and stable—if not for one major lifestyle choice. “What would compromise all of that? You suddenly realize, ‘Oh, well, the chair,’” he explains. “And the chair only really [came into common use] during the Renaissance period, right? What were we doing prior to that?”

Understanding the regions of localized pain through that lens, Riddle started to tackle the issue from dual angles: one, prescribing different footwear, and two, encouraging folks to spend more time on the floor. At home, Riddle practices exactly what he preaches. His family abode is largely furniture-free, with just a low dining table, some bolsters, and no beds. His four children have only known the Spartan life. He’s dubbed their version of the extreme minimalism style “primal chic.”

“When my dad was my age, I would hear him groaning as he got in and out of the chair. He didn’t have the capacity to get on the ground because he’d become divorced from it for so long,” he says. “My kids observe me doing all kinds of crazy crawling patterns around the house and squatting, hanging off things.” Health reasons aside, the way Riddle sees it, minimalism actually maximalizes the bang they get for their buck. “If we pay so much money per square foot or meter, yet we just fill it with loads of furniture, you’re literally shuffling to get around the furniture. For us, it was about creating lots of space so our kids could express themselves fully.”

Naturally, as a coach, Riddle spreads the furniture-free gospel IRL and via his online channels. Eight thousand miles away, Cape Town couple Angela “Ang” Horn and Saskia “Sporty” Busch are among those familiar with his work. In the aughts, they moved around the region quite frequently, and Horn, who was stuck ironing out the bulk of the relocation logistics while Busch was focused on her career, slowly became fatigued with packing, ferrying, and unpacking their possessions. By 2008, she had reached her breaking point and was ready to divest from things completely, resorting to renting only furnished dwellings. Busch, for her part, was willing to try, so they went ahead and shed all their stuff—including a bunch of furniture they’d just bought. “When Ang says something and it’s really important to her, I feel like one needs to have a look at it. So we did it,” Busch says.

About a decade later, a podcast in which Riddle was discussing the benefits of his pared-down lifestyle inspired a second streamline. “I go to Sporty and say, ‘Next place, we’re not having furniture.’ And she was like, ‘What?’” Horn recalls.

At the end of 2021, they moved into an unfurnished cottage with plans to get just a futon. “We used it for a while, it was good because it kept us low,” Horn says. “But we ditched it again recently. Now we actually sleep right on the floor on camping mattresses. It’s so comfortable.”

They both work from home, sitting on the floor with a low desk table setup. The camping mattresses, bolsters, and a sparsely adorned bookcase account for the rest of the furnishings. Several years into the extreme minimalism plunge, they offer only positive notes about the impact of their decision. “We’re both close to 60. But we’re really strong now because [we] have to get up off the floor,” Horn says. “We want to be those Blue Zones people who are a 100 and still dragging rocks around.” Busch concurs, adding that her balance and back pain have improved astronomically since they made the switch. “I had quite terrible back issues, which have pretty much dissolved,” she says. “Also just in terms of the space, we’re a lot more connected as a couple because there’s no physical barriers—dining room tables and those kinds of things. And our kitty cat loves when we’re on the floor.”

Horn claims that they’re not “decor girls, at all,” but the two have enjoyed making YouTube videos about their lifestyle and have gotten familiar with more folks in the furniture-free community, some of whom enjoy infusing their open spaces with a side of design personality.

Melissa “Meli” Rios, a yoga instructor and digital content creator in Manhattan, is one such furniture-free adherent. She characterizes her apartment’s look as bohemian. While pothos plants cascade from floating their shelf posts and a few skateboards hang from wall mounts, the human residents of the one-bedroom, Rios and her husband, take the floor. She encourages her yoga students to dabble with a furniture-free lifestyle in small doses, starting with simply sitting down on the floor, which she says will improve “their life, posture, hips, bone density, and abdominals.” The wide-open nature of the space was great for business during the pandemic. “It was my yoga studio, and for teaching online yoga as well. So it was really nice and open [for my practice]. It can serve for multiple purposes, at the end of the day, and that helped me a lot.”

Rios and her husband got into minimalism following two pivotal trips to Asia: first in 2017, when backpacking in Thailand proved they could live happily with few possessions in tow. A couple years later, traveling through Korea showed the couple they could take it a step further. “We started observing that a lot of traditional Korean restaurants have a tiny table and everybody would sit down on the floor. We saw a lot of older people able to sit down on the floor and stand up easily, and we usually don’t see that in our culture—I’m from Costa Rica,” she says. “After that, we decided to start letting go of more furniture, instead of just possessions. It was a challenging process, but I think society tells us that our homes have to be furnished, maybe not because we want it.”

It’s not uncommon for those who’ve pared down to view their minimalism as a rejection of consumerism and an embrace of an aesthetic with deep roots in East Asia. Iterations of the style date back centuries on the continent, but it still inspires emerging incarnations to this day, like Korean minimalism. Peter Doebler, who has researched Asian aesthetics and works as the Kettering curator of Asian art at the Dayton Art Institute, brings up a central philosophy that informs the region’s trademark minimalism—which is less about chucking everything and more about honoring the essence of individual items and features.

“The first thing that comes to mind in relation to minimalism and East Asian aesthetics, especially in architecture and design, is the idea of ma, which could be translated as a gap, a pause, an interval,” Doebler explains. In this school of thought, the absence of things isn’t necessarily a negation; rather, “the emptiness, the space, is as important as the form,” Doebler says.

“You especially see it in spatial aesthetics when you think about interior design and traditional Japanese architecture, but it can also have relation to temporal movement or sound or things like that,” he says, pointing out that traditional Japanese gardens and flower arrangement can also illustrate the concept. “When you look at traditional Japanese architecture, yes, there is a lot of empty space, a lot of clean lines, but there’s also a way of accenting the individual materials. Take a traditional Japanese Tatami room: You have what's known as the tokonoma, this area where you could put a hanging scroll with calligraphy or maybe a flower arrangement, which [showcases] this very special object—a treasure—and the way it’s placed within the empty space is this dialogue that uses emptiness to really highlight that individual object.”

For some, digging into minimalism highlighted the fact that they had no true need for a home base at all. Peter Lawrence has been living as a nomad for nearly a decade. Those who engage with internet content on extreme minimalism are likely familiar with Lawrence, who published The Happy Minimalist in 2008 after finding few existing entries in the canon. A 2012 video by YouTuber Kirstin Dirksen is a seminal text in extreme minimalist circles. It’s not hard to see why those who subscribe to the idea might find Lawrence’s version of it aspirational.

Lawrence notes both his modest family upbringing and his Catholic faith as paths that led him to nonpossession. “Jesus is a minimalist—from the place that he was born in, to the donkey he rode on, where he celebrated the Last Supper, as well as the tomb that he was laid on, he owned nothing, nada, zilch, right?” Lawrence says. When he moved out of the house and started earning a healthy salary at Hewlett Packard, Lawrence found no reason to start amassing more stuff. A 2005 relocation from Texas to California marked an epiphany that would lead to an even more intentional execution of minimalism.

“The move was initiated by me, so the company didn’t pay for the relocation costs,” he explains. “When I looked at the things that I had, I realized that I didn’t actually need a lot of it; I simplified such that I could fit everything into my compact size Honda Civic, and I drove from Houston all the way to Santa Clara. And that was just liberating.”

In his new Northern California home, he kept an austere wardrobe and saw no need for furnishings. “When people look at [Dirksen’s] video, there’s always this tendency—even people that know me well—to say, ‘This kind of life is not sustainable; at some point in time, you’ll want furniture and you’ll end up procuring it.’ But they couldn't be more wrong, because I doubled down. I went from little furniture to no furniture.” He considered a futon at one point, but it would only have been for the comfort of visitors.

Guests can present a challenge for many furniture-free folks. Quebec-based software engineer Jodie, who has been living furniture-free for a few months, has found a way around it. She and her roommate are both minimalists, but their lack of seating has not made either of them less inclined to host. “Me and my roommate are both very social, very extroverted, and we have people over a lot,” she says. “I know a lot of people justify having a lot of stuff because they have people over, but in practice, we make do. It’s like having a picnic.”

Couch surfing for a few years led Jodie to paring down on belongings. When she landed on an apartment, she opted not to furnish it. “For me, the motivation is mostly getting rid of needs in general and getting rid of attachments, but also the practical aspect of the less needs you have, then the more resources you have for the things that actually matter to you. Society tells you that you need a lot of things that you might not necessarily need,” she says.

The list of benefits, in her opinion, goes on and on. She’s kept track:

1. “There’s definitely the health and fitness aspect, just getting off the ground all the time and not sitting all day. Changing your position throughout the day when you’re working has been really good for just, like I have this superpower that I can just sit without back support forever.”

2. “It makes small spaces practical. So this tiny room doesn’t feel very tiny, because it doesn’t have anything in it.”

3. “It’s much cheaper to live this way because good furniture is extremely expensive and a larger apartment, especially in a big city, is very expensive.”

4. “Also, cheap furniture is terrible for the environment.”

5. “It makes you more adaptable because you don’t feel like you need all of these things in order to be comfortable, and it also makes your space more adaptable; you can do whatever you want because there’s nothing in your way. Our living room is often used as a bike shop and a workout room.”

Jodie’s brand of minimalism, like Rios’s, does not sacrifice on a personalized atmosphere. “I am not necessarily a fan of the minimalist aesthetic; I like having loud colors and patterns and little trinkets. I like my space to feel lived in,” she says. “And if minimalism isn’t for you, maybe living furniture-free might be for you.”

Extreme minimalist Niels Bohrmann also feels the perks outweigh the drawbacks, though he acknowledges the hosting issue. “With dating in the past, yes, you do get funny looks for sure [when people come over],” he says. “If you’re on a date, you bring it up very early on in the conversation, so people are not shocked once they get to your apartment. Quite a few people actually are quite amused by it.” He’s based in Germany for most months of the year, but Bohrmann, like Lawrence, has followed the path of minimalism to its apparent endpoint of nomadism.

“Right now I’m coaching, basically helping other weirdos to do what I do—not just minimalism, but the whole digital nomad lifestyle, leaving the 9-to-5, traveling the world,” he explains. When he’s globetrotting in places like Thailand, Egypt, and Mexico, it’s surprisingly difficult to find the kinds of bare-bones rentals that cater to his furniture-free tastes. “I do specifically look for empty apartments,” Bohrmann says. “In Mexico, where I stayed for six months, I got lucky and found an apartment that only had a bed, but the bed did have a frame. Other than that, it didn’t have anything else. So that was fairly ideal.”

Stripping down his possessions forced Bohrmann to confront consumerism in ways that changed him completely—eventually, he thinks, for the better. “Once I started selling, donating, and tossing my stuff, it did feel very upsetting for a while, because we really tie our identity into the things we own,” he says. “If you throw these things away, it feels like an attack on your identity because you are so invested in those things. It’s like [they] represent you and what you stand for, in a sense, and I don’t think we quite realize this. You get these almost anxiety attacks, initially. But once I got over that phase, there were really only benefits after.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest