The Unfolding Apartment: Next Step

An earlier item in this blog, The Unfolding Apartment addressed a crucial trend in small home design: making the most of limited space to enhance daily life, using ingenious technology.

Based on his favorite concept of “exchange”—adapting the same space to a variety of tasks during the day with movable and foldable walls and furniture—architect Michael K. Chen is collaborating with adaptable furniture maker Häfele to expand the concept beyond the microapartment.

The basic unit, 12x16 ft, might constitute a microapartment or part of a co-living or institutional complex. It evolves from a bedroom to a kitchen to an office to a dining area to a nighttime entertainment area, with the required furniture unfolding, folding, or sliding in or out as needed. The hardware that makes all this possible is a Häfele product—in fact, Chen admits to making freelance use of pieces from the Häfele catalog in his design for the original Unfolding Apartment.

He believes that these pieces can be moved and manipulated with relative ease by reasonably able-bodied seniors, with easy-operating pistons and self-closing doors, for example, “but more work is underway to make things effortless and reliable.”

Häfele is also extending the possibilities by venturing into sensor technology and Amazon Echo-based use for supportive living, another key feature of the coming small home trend. “I’m somewhat ambivalent about this right now,” he says, “because of privacy concerns, and I think our culture still has to move more toward general acceptance of this infrastructure.”

In fact Chen still sees this as bleeding-edge, with builders and developers continuing to grapple with the new concepts involved in both designing and marketing high-density, space-saving structures, particularly in downtown areas. “But there’s a lot of serious thought going on in these circles right now and it’s just a matter of time.”

For an idea of the “exchanges” in action, check out Chen’s website.

The Unfolding Apartment

The sheer ingenuity of design that allows small spaces to become supportive, comfortable places to live has been noted before in this blog (see, “Multi-use Furniture Enabling Small Spaces”). Personifying the “designer of the future” who will produce such spaces is New York architect Michael Chen, principal of Michael K. Chen Architecture (MKCA). The innovative “pieces/parts” he’s designed for a dynamically accommodating microapartment have set the standard for design of small spaces of 400 square feet or less.

Chen started a few years ago with the 420 square foot “unfolding apartment.” Its flexible element is a large cabinet containing a Murphy bed, nightstand, closet and home office, each of which can be pulled out to transform a space from living room to office to bedroom, as needed. A flip-down panel offers multiple uses as a console table, a dry bar or a desk. The design, in Chen’s words, allows for an “exchange” of living situations during the day.

“Exchange” is a word he uses frequently—it is the underlying concept of all his work in designing microapartments.

Exchange is provided differently by a 390 square foot apartment in the city’s Gramercy Park neighborhood in which the transforming element is a sliding storage wall that can slide from one end of the apartment to the other. In this case of what he calls the 5:1 apartment the space layout itself is “exchanged,” with living areas changing in size to accommodate sleeping and dressing in the morning, doing office work during the day and watching TV at night. Power and cabling for all this is cleverly built in.

The moveable wall has built-in clothing storage, a queen-sized fold-down bed, an entertainment area, appurtenances for a home office, a dry bar and a library. A six-foot table can be pulled out for dinner parties (not a common event in microapartments!), but can also serve as a desk with a built-in computer and printer.

The supporting infrastructure for this is a mechanical marvel Chen has designed featuring a sliding track on top, a steel strip embedded in the floor for support and casters to allow movement. The wall’s movement is motorized.

This is where the Chen concepts can become somewhat challenging as adaptations for senior living. “Some strength is still required to move things,” he says, “and items such as beds are still standardized, with no customization available as yet to meet special needs.”

It is in senior design, Chen says, that further innovation is needed. “We’re considering developing the new hardware and other elements ourselves for more adaptability. Architecture in general shouldn’t expect to use standardized items in this area. It is time to move on.”

Applying such ingenuity to the design of senior housing appears to be only a matter of time.

Multi-use furniture enabling small spaces

courtesy of resource furniture

Essential to the livability of the “small house” format is the ingeniousness of today’s furniture design. A small space can feel cramped and isolated without careful thought to the interior design and its contents. As spaces get smaller, so much greater is the need for innovation in furnishings.

courtesy of resource furniture

Resource Furniture is a New York-based firm that has made a name for itself in the growing niche field of small unit design. Its focus has been upon the so-called microapartment—a unit of 300 to 400 square feet, in specially designed urban apartment buildings.

Today’s projects, such as those now going up in New York and San Francisco, are aimed at appealing to young professionals, both singles and couples, who seek affordable housing choices within highly expensive cities. To date, Resource Furniture has concentrated most of its efforts toward meeting that marketplace.

But the concepts involved are highly adaptable to a senior housing market growing ever more needful of similar choices, says Steve Spett, company co-founder. “Though it’s not a trend yet, we’re seeing signs of a growing appeal, especially for empty-nesters who are actively planning for old age,” Spett says.

courtesy of resource furniture

“We aim to make 300 square feet seem like 600 square feet, with plenty of options for living, sleeping and dining. And these apartment dwellings accommodate the recognition that seniors as they age still need ready access to amenities, common spaces and social opportunities, as much as anyone else.”

One need the new microapartments strive to accommodate is that of storage, of particular concern to seniors attempting to downsize or, as Spett puts it, rightsize. “We start by asking the senior to make the hard decisions about what they need now, what they can do without, and what they need to store. These days family photo albums can be stored electronically, and filing cabinets full of necessary documents can be scanned onto thumb drives. Then they have to decide what they can do without, such as outdated items of clothing.”

courtesy of resource furniture

The microapartment designer goes to the limit in cleverly designing good storage space within the unit. Space can take advantage of varying floor heights and stairways, while other storage can be created within and around multi-functional furniture that can be easily lifted, folded or otherwise moved out of the way.

“Getting each piece of furniture to do two things, sometimes three things, is key,” says Spett. “A coffee table can be converted to a dining table or a desk, an ottoman can be folded out as seating for five, beds can become sofas or simply folded into a wall, partitions can be moved to enlarge or reduce a living space, and so forth.”

courtesy of resource furniture

The design ingenuity on display in many of today’s accessory dwelling units is amazing. But adding to their feasibility as places for aging in place is the advent of new communications technology that both monitors and supports seniors in their daily living tasks—motion sensors, voice-activated servers and more.

Smallhomesforaging.com will track all this as it develops for seniors and their families in coming weeks and months. The days of super-expensive and not always helpful housing for seniors and their families may well be numbered.