NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - WANTED DESIGN
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - SATELLITE SHOWS
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - ICFF
FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
The motto of LifeEdited, an experiment in compact living started by Treehugger founder Graham Hill, is an alluring one: "Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy." The design of the prototype LifeEdited apartment (actually Hill's residence) fulfills the motto neatly, incorporating furniture you'll recognize from our Resource Furniture videos (here and here), an intelligently-designed moving wall, and lots of nice little touches that reveal some serious depth of thought:
Crazy seeing what an absolute craphole the apartment was before Hill's insane reno. I also admire how he's extended his philosophy of editing things down even to the kitchen implements and his clothing.
Another experimental apartment with a similar approach to Hill's—but with a far less finished execution that could use some polishing, particularly in the wall-moving mechanism—is Japan-based design firm Studio_01's Barcode Room:
While Hill's actually living in the LifeEdited apartment, the Barcode Room is a work in progress, thus explaining the rawness. As it stands I prefer the former design, but it will be interesting to see what Studio_01 comes up with during their ongoing development.
Comments
It's a cute idea, but with all the money spent on the upgrading, buying specialty appliances, maintenance of specialty furnitures and the amount of time spent... you could probably get an apartment 3 times the size and live like the rest of the country. It's more like "look how small I can live" than the original idea of living small, more money, more time and more happiness.
I do like some of the ideas, like getting stackable/nesting items.
If it becomes widespread, though, "specialty" will turn in to "ordinary", and prices will come down.
Isn't the point that one can't live in an apt three times that size, if they don't exist or are prohibitively expensive? The best (only?) I see this working is if a building were commissioned or retrofitted to bring economies of scale to bear. Disused warehouses or other structure that combine location and the right physical attributes could house these.
Could be amazing in SF. Since you can't build up because of earthquakes, people are definitely looking to maximize space.