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.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

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

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot