San Francisco's Smallest Legal Apartments Inspired by Airstream

Bay Area developer Patrick Kennedy wants to build the housing equivalent of the Smart Car.
His SmartSpaces will be small -- just a couple hundred square feet -- and prefabricated.

To create a smarter space, Kennedy constructed a 160-square-foot test home (the smallest legal-sized apartment for California) inside a Berkeley warehouse. SmartSpace 1.0 is filled with innovations like the SmartBench, an adjustable banquette that converts from a dining table to a guest bed.

To give the space a true test run, an MIT student lived in it for a few weeks to determine what features were truly smart in real life circumstances. She gave low marks to the "Euro shower" (the shower and drain are part of the bathroom) and to the tiny, round kitchen sink (too small for a pasta pan), neither which made the cut for SmartSpace 2.0.

In this video, Kennedy gives us an exclusive tour of the tiny SmartSpace 1.0 studio, as well as of his 78-square-foot Airstream travel trailer parked outside (his vacations onboard with wife and child inspired his latest development).

Related video from faircompanies

• Barcelona LEGO-style apartment transforms into infinite spaces
• Manhattan shoebox apartment: a 78-square-foot mini studio
• Maison garage: old parking as tiny home in Bordeaux, France

 

Follow Kirsten Dirksen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kirstendirksen

Comments

[campcranston]

07:05 PM on 02/21/2012

While I admire the ingenuity, this is not the solution for San Francisco. There are tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, it's time for the city to get on the landlords, get the buildings up to code and give people a place to live. With big money silicon valley employees calling this city home, rents are going crazy, why would we create more buildings when there's already so many abandoned?

[Amy Turnbull]

01:13 AM on 02/23/2012

Ron, this is what you were talking about--using existing space.