Cool Solution For Increasing Space In Your Small Roosevelt Island NYC Apartment - Micro Home Furniture From MIT Media Lab City Home

I bet you could use some more space in your Roosevelt Island apartment.

Images From MIT Media Lab City Home You Tube Video

Perhaps soon, technology developed by the MIT Media Lab will help.

According to Fast Co Design:

... Two hundred square feet. It’s horrifyingly small, even by New York standards. But a new project called CityHome, by MIT Media Lab’s Changing Places group, can make it feel like you're living in an apartment three times as big.

CityHome is essentially a hideaway bed taken to the upteenth level. It’s a mechanical box about the size of a closet that sits inside an apartment, where it stows a bed, dining room table, kitchen surface, a cooking range, a closet, and multipurpose storage, too. Through gestures, touch, and voice control, each element can be called forth from the cube. Internal motors eject each piece with the convenient fluidity of a power window. And, in a final trick, the entire module can move a few feet each way, extending or compressing a room at will. (If you’re not in the bathroom, do you need the space to use the shower, or would that square footage be better served in the living room or kitchen?)...

Click here for the entire Fast Co Design article.

Digital Trends adds:

... Contrary to what the name might suggest, CityHome isn’t actually a living space itself. It’s more like a large, consolidated chunk of home essentials that allows you to maximize usable space in a small studio. Think of it like a murphy bed on steroids — it’s basically a closet-sized mechanical box that fits into an apartment and functions as a bed, work space, city home dining room table (with seating for six), a cooking range, closet, and multipurpose storage space....

and:

Since CityHome is currently just a prototype, there’s no word on when it’ll be available to consumers, or how big the price tag will be if/when that day comes. That being said, however, the project’s lead researcher Kent Larson has clearly expressed that he intends to bring it to market through either a startup or a commercial sponsor....

Click here for the entire Digital Trends article.

Watch the video and dream what you could do.



Here's more on the MIT Media Lab Changing Places Group.

Need More Square Footage? Try the Strap on Back Pack Room to Increase the Size of your Apartment

Images from Fresh Home via Convertible City

Have you ever wanted to increase the size of your Roosevelt Island apartment? Are you jealous of your single family homeowner friends and relatives who can expand their living space square footage by building on an extra room? No matter what the size of your New York City apartment, we all need more space. Sometimes if you are very lucky and can afford to, this problem can be solved by combining units adjacent to, above or below your apartment. But most of us don't have the opportunity to combine apartments. Don't worry. Wired may have the solution:

Looking for a new way to piss off your landlord or co-op board? How about adding a new room to your unit without a contractor or any silly permits?
That's the opportunity afforded by the "backpack house," a folding, pref-fab cube meant to attach to the side of any dwelling, adding about 80 square feet of living space. It weighs about 2 tons, so anyone above the ground floor is likely to need a crane to get it into position.

Fresh Home via Convertible City has more:

Located between art and architecture, the backpack house is a walk-in sculpture with their own spatial quality: a floating, lighted room, as a temporary scaffolding and a “minimal sculpture” also appears. Universally used as a mini-backpack, this house adds extra space at the front of each residential building attached.