Before you decide to move into a super small, space optimized apartment look around your current place. Is it always super neat and tidy? You need to be making your bed every day and put away your furniture all the time in order to make many of the tiny apartment designs work.
It only works as long as you're doing one and only thing at a time. If that space is shared, be prepared to move away and clean everything when you commit to the other activity which takes the same space. It only works for a very small number of activities.
Said by a person using a bunk bed to reclaim extra floor space.
However, what I was ideally looking for was tours of houses/apartments which are heavily optimised interior decoration-wise, but also massive. Sort of like the intersection of the $XX million dollar apartment tours that exist, but instead focused more on the interior design. I enjoy the novelty in watching really expensive houses, but they always feel sparse and terribly designed (interior-wise). Maybe nice to look at, but not practical at all.
Let's think about it for a second:
- you cannot have anything (unless it's flat, so maybe a book on a table) on those mebels if you want to lower the bed
- you also need to make sure nothing is around to block your bed
- you cannot use the wall at all since it's part of the lowering mechanism
- you need to fit this whole contraption inside
- there must be some additional lines holding the "inner" end of the bed otherwise it would fall apart
- having a heavy mechanical contraption right above my head doesn't really induce a feeling of safety
- it can get stuck up, so you are left without a bed
- or even worse, it can get stuck halfway through descending, so you have no room left in your room
Incidentally, a good folding couch has none of the aforementioned problems.
Unless they took care to secure their IoT Heavy Furniture.
It all looks very fancy but this is one aspect of life where I appreciate low- or no-technology.
The support for whatever cloud offering is backing these (and there will be, there always is, despite there being no need for it) will likely lapse before the furniture itself is used up. Does anyone believe you can install one of these and have it work for twenty years?
These things should not be connected to the internet.
I wouldn't move into a house that only had room for a sofa bed, because I know myself well enough to know I'd end up leaving it in bed mode all the time. Fold up and store my duvet and pillow, and lift some heavy ass mechanism every morning? No thanks.
I can see the appeal of something fully automated, just like I can see the appeal of getting a motorised standing desk instead of a hand-cranked one.
Insomnia is no joke and can easily ruin your life. I wonder if those transforming spaces help or exasperate the problem.
I guess they can very visibly change the space so your brain doesn’t consider it “the same room”, but maybe they don’t…
Of course, having a morning routine that involved getting my (2 year old) daughter up and ready for her day before I started work also helped create separation.
As it stands, their design would require some serious reinforcement of the walls and ceiling in the space the bed occupies for most buildings I've encountered.
What if the upstairs neighbor floods and the mattress becomes saturated with water? Will it come tumbling down, ripping out the wall and crushing anything underneath? Buying a bed suddenly becomes an exercise in actuarial science.
Cloud Bed, Sofa Edition (King) → $16,750
Shipping → $340
Installation → $2,213
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Your Total Estimate → USD $19,303 (+tax)\*
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That said, I once paid a lot for one of these [1], so I guess I shouldn't knock it. I do prefer that this one doesn't have any moving parts, though it's only suitable for tall ceilings.
I rented a luxury micro studio, your kitchen is in your bedroom! And the fold out bed/ couch would never lock on place. It keep falling on me.
I ended up moving to a massive 2 bdrm, which was in an older building. My life was so much better overnight. No longer did I need to hear my neighbors and vice versa. And I got a normal bed which didn't try to collapse upon me.
That moving bed on the front page is going to kill someone. Even if it's fine out of the box, what about in 15 years. A conventional bed frame might just crack, it's hard to imagine it crushing you.
Give me a futon over this
It's no longer viable if there's more than one person in a place like this though.
In some situations and for some people I guess it pays off. Seems like a hassle to me.
I'm not sure I can articulate it effectively, but I have looked at such furniture online and that's my tentative hypothesis.
Tiny houses, apartments, single room places are a compromise. Some people really insist on living in a city, which is fair enough for them. Some people compromise to do so. I for one am happy to live outside of the cities in a normal size house with a bit of outdoor space. Long-term plan is to move to a bigger place, even further away from the cities (I live in a suburb at the moment).
Then you won't have to be meticulously tidy and will have the option to have someone watching TV and sleeping at the same time (or whichever other tradeoff each of those furniture items offer)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/gary-ch...
What I think people miss is the "designed storage", for instance in the office setup.
There are lots of places space is carefully planned and efficient.
I think of cars (cupholders, phone chargers) and to a lesser extent RVs (sleeping + clothes storage; kitchen; basement). I'm sure there are other good examples where planned efficient use of space is convenient and makes life lots easier. The wonderful use of all space in cars (cupholders, etc), and RV's