The project came to be after the founders were given a $1, one month lease for the vacant SOMA neighborhood warehouse (if you’re unfamiliar with SF real estate, this is a good deal). While we apologize profusely for the delayed announcement, there is still a lot going on for the remaining 12 days of June–yoga classes, a TEDx event, hackathons, live music, salons and much more.

One of the most endearing aspects of [freespace] is its sense of urgency. With a 30 day lifespan, there’s no dilly-dallying. They have started several projects meant to endure beyond June, including a 30 day garden, a mobile learning center for the homeless, a matchmaker-service for muralists and walls and its own bikeshare program.

To us, [freespace] exemplifies the increasingly paradoxical nature of many of the world’s leading cities. On the one hand, the cities often hold the highest concentrations of creative energy that make living there so great. On the other hand, the rising cost of these cities–both for commercial and residential real estate–make the conditions inhospitable for that creativity to flourish. People with jobs of indeterminate value (see artists) and real estate that doesn’t generate a lot of money are usually excised or marginalized by the city.

In fact, a project like [freespace] only exists due to the largesse of its donors (the city, its real estate broker and property owner)–and it’s only for a month. The [freespace]ers have launched a fundraising campaign to cover July’s $24K rent, but have only raised $3700 to date.

We wish [freespace] the best of luck and hope that similar projects arise in other cities–ones that might endure for more than a month. By providing large, low or no cost communal spaces for people to meet and create in, we imagine the creativity that makes our cities so valuable will flourish once again.

The apartment, dubbed “Appartement Spectral”, is a study in light. In order to compensate for a dearth of natural light (a point we’re not sure we’d agree on), BDB decided to play around with different types of artificial lights. One side of the apartment is lit by low-pressure sodium lights and the other florescent. Each type of light has a different color rendering index (CRI). “The CRI of a light describes its ability to reflect accurate color of a surface,” according to BDB.

The low-pressure sodium lights, which are the same orange lights you see illuminating cities when you’re in an airplane, have a very low CRI, which means everything ends up monochromatic and the same orangey hew of the light. These lights are relegated to the bathing and sleeping areas where BDB thought distinguishing color was not as critical.

The florescent lights have a very high CRI and thereby render all reflected colors near perfectly. These lights were placed in the living and kitchen areas where color distinction is more useful.

In terms of how the sparse interior and light play off one another, BDB says this:

The apartment is designed in a simple and neutral expression, without color or particular detail, annihilating any architectural expressiveness or narrative to leave only the logic of composition generated by light.

The apartment is pretty gorgeous in our opinion, but we do wonder what it would be like to live in. In terms of sterility, this place makes the LifeEdited apartment look like a music festival porta-potty–it’s whiter than white. And as interesting as the theory is behind the lighting, we’re not sure how it makes the space more livable necessarily.

Of course our questions are a bit silly. This is not an apartment for just anyone. This is a tiny aesthetic wonderland and, for the right esthete, this would make a perfect home.

via Arch Daily

Photo credit: Betillon Dorval-Bory

The website Tokyo Apartment Inc is filled with remarkable and daring designs that would be a big deal anywhere other than Japan. The apartments are small, but high end. They are well-lit, feature high quality materials, are decked out with appropriate appliances and have more interesting architecture than you’re likely to find on any Craigslist rental. We perused the TOI site with not-so-micro envy. Hopefully, one day the US and other hefty-haunched-homed nations will pick up some of the Japanese design cues.

All images via Tokyo Apartment Inc

Craigslist has become such an integral part of the peer-to-peer marketplace, we often don’t give it its proper respect. Sure, it’s filled with scammers, pervs, inveterate dealmakers and the like. But it is also filled with more respectable people in your area that are looking to buy your stuff. It also happens to be super easy and free to use!

Most of have extensive experience with Craigslist, so we won’t bore you with a bunch of stuff you already know. Nor will we delve into how to hit your missed connection or land a “gig.” No, today we’re going to focus on selling. This author recently cleared out a ton of stuff from his family’s coffers and here are some of the things I learned:

1. The basics. Find your local CL page off of www.craigslist.org. Go to “post to classifieds” on the upper left corner of homepage. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.
2. Create a CL account (you should actually do this first). Do not bypass this step. If you’re selling stuff, particularly bigger, expensive stuff, it’s quite common that it will not sell on the first go. By creating an account, you won’t have to recreate a listing every time you refresh your post. Your account dashboard will track all of your items and allow you to edit and re-post when they’ve been deleted.
3. Refresh or repost your posts. Stuff gets buried on CL, especially in large communities. Make sure your post is near the top by reposting when it’s expired (less of an issue in smaller communities).
4. Branch out to nearby CL communities, which are listed on the right sidebar of your CL homepage. This author happens to live fairly close to the borders of three different CL communities and I posted on all three to increase odds of selling. Unfortunately, I had to make three different posts for the same item on each community’s site–in other words, there is no function to replicate a post in another community. But once you have that post set, the heavy lifting is over.
5. A word about scammers/phishers. So you just posted your Louis XVI armoire for $350K and there’s an immediate response, “Is it still available?” Score! Sorry, it’s a scammer or someone looking to hack your email. If there is an actual interested buyer, he or she will refer to the item in question, e.g. armoire, not “it” or “your item.” Do not reply to these emails. Some have suggested making an email address just for Craigslist; a good idea this author never incorporated.
6. Price on the high side. People on Craigslist are not afraid to make low-ball offers. You want to price your stuff 10-30% above the price you won’t go below. This way, when a buyer makes a low-ball offer, you have room to negotiate. You can say “final price” or “firm” but c’mon, it’s Craigslist. Every now and again, you’ll get someone who pays what you ask, but it’s exceedingly rare. Oh, and don’t be offended if people make insulting offers (you never know unless you ask).
7. Have a delivery plan. Unlike eBay, Craigslist is an awesome place to sell furniture, but if you have a ten piece sectional couch and don’t own a box truck to deliver it with, you want to have a plan to get it to a buyer. It’s actually not necessary to state the plan in your post as that might scare away a potential buyer, but have an answer: Buyer is responsible, look into Uhaul rates or man with a van costs (often the best option). This can be a real sticking point if you’re selling a $300 couch that costs $200 to deliver.
8. Take some time to make a nice post. Always include pictures (this should be obvious). And don’t use those 1.5 megapixel images. Describe how great your used jackhammer is. A sloppy post with few details and crappy pictures is far less likely to get your item out the door for a decent price than a polished one with great, accurate photos.
9. Sell your really valuable items somewhere else. For all its awesomeness, Craigslist is mostly populated with folks looking for a deal. You can sell your original Barcelona chairs on CL, but don’t expect a fair price. Craigslist is all about convenience and providing maximum reach in a particular region. EBay, which taps into international buyers, is a far better bet for getting a fair price on your very valuables.
10. Use common sense. Don’t meet alone in the woods to meet your potential buyer, accept cash or money orders only, anonymize your email address and don’t give any more info than you have to, etc.

Got any other tips for selling on CL? Let us know in our comments section.

Rams made his name at Braun, where over the course of 40 years he designed some of the most elegant and recognizable products ever produced.

More than mere industrial designer, Rams was a philosopher. Rams distilled the ethos behind his designs in his “Ten Principles of Good Design” (see below), a demanding set of criterion that a design must meet before going into production.

In the above video produced by Dwell, we get a glimpse into Rams’ exacting soul. In the interview, he claims that in his heyday at Braun, he could count the number of companies that took design seriously on two hands. Nowadays, he says it’s down to one finger (you might be able to guess which Cupertino-based company that is). Rams apparently wants better design everywhere. From products to cities, he thinks the world is simply “too chaotic.”

It would seem if most designs–product or otherwise–were subjected Ramsian levels of scrutiny and exactitude, most things would never be produced (not a bad thing necessarily). Somehow, we think this world might be a lot less cluttered and make a whole lot more sense. We can dream, can’t we?

Rams’ Ten Principles of “Good Design”:

1. Good Design Is Innovative: The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good Design Makes a Product Useful: A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good Design Is Aesthetic: The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good Design Makes A Product Understandable: It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good Design Is Unobtrusive: Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6. Good Design Is Honest: It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept
7. Good Design Is Long-lasting: It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail: Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
9. Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly: Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible: Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

As the above chart shows, after a momentary decrease in size following the housing bubble burst, new homes are close to matching their all time high average of 2521 sq ft in 2007.

What the chart doesn’t show is that the inflated home size is coupled with the persistent shrinking size of the American household. In 2012 the average American household contained a record low 2.55 people–basically 1000 sq ft per occupant of the newly constructed home. Compare that to 40 years ago, when there were 3.01 people per household and the average new home size was 1660 sq ft, or 550 sq ft per occupant.

It should be noted that building production was way down in 2012. In 2007, there were 1.5M new, single-family homes completed. In 2012, that number was 649K.

Prices are up but still down overall. In 2012, the average new, single-family home sold for $292K. That figure peaked in 2007 at $313K. A couple years later, that number sunk to $270K. While this number has steadily increased since the dip, a quick glance makes relative construction costs seem quite low.

This all points to the fact that people build big because they can afford to. With interest rates hovering around 3%, money is very cheap right now for the well-heeled populations who can secure a loan; combine that with cheap construction and energy costs and the financial choice to build big is an easy one for people who already have more money than most. As Lloyd Alter wrote in Treehugger today on this topic, “Money is cheap. Natural gas is cheap. The trades are cheap. What could possibly go wrong?” The only sliver of a silver lining is that it’s fewer, albeit richer, people who are buying these big homes.

This decrease in new single family home construction has not triggered a boom in the construction of units in multifamily buildings. In 2012, there were 166K units completed in multifamily buildings. Compare that to 284K in 2007 or 840K forty years ago.

We wish we had a “but the bright side is” statement, but we don’t. Basically, a smaller subset of the American population is building and buying as big, or bigger, than they ever had. And cities are growing ever denser without a commensurate increase in multifamily building construction, driving prices higher and higher.

What do you think? Outside of a major economic downturn, what would compel Americans to start demanding smaller homes? Will smaller homes always remain a weird niche in the American housing market? Do you think smart design can have a bearing on the emergence of smaller homes? Or will people always choose more when the option presents itself? Please share your thoughts in our comments section.

Contemporary House image via Shutterstock

Screenshot via The Atlantic Cities

In Leonard’s previous life, he lived in a five bedroom Mill Valley home with his then-wife and their two children. He commuted 40 minutes each way to San Francisco for work and he and his wife regularly shuttled the kids long distances to school.

Today, he has a 30 second commute down a set of stairs. His ex-wife is now his next-door neighbor. Their two units are joined by a tiny door through the bathroom. The daughter occupies half of the downstairs in Leonard’s home. Presumably their son has a room in the downstairs unit of the mother’s home (not shown). Between the work-from-home situation and a closer school, the family’s need to drive has been slashed considerably.

Each unit’s downstairs square footage is 593 and the upstairs is 974, which includes a sleeping loft. This makes the Leonard family home hardly tiny, especially if you add in the square footage of his ex-wife’s unit. But there’s a lot going on here: There are two children, there is Leonard and his new partner, there is an ex-wife (relationship status unknown) and two offices. The complex also includes a pilates studio and a coffee shop, which allow Leonard, formerly bound to his car, to hardly ever drive. Because he and his ex live next to each other and their children live closer to school, there is no shuttling of the kids from home to home and to and from school.

Figures came out last week indicating that in 2012 the average size for a new home in the US has increased again, going from 2480 to 2505 sq ft. These numbers don’t include those new home resident’s office space, commute times, lot size, etc. When looked at in total, Leonard and his brood are doing pretty great in terms of maximizing space and energy.

What’s also exciting about Leonard’s situation at Florence Lofts is that it shows a model for the modern village. It has a “local” economy of sorts as people work from home. The lofts are close to town and people live close to one another; similar to the Pocket Neighborhoods we looked at the other week, they have an outdoor commons (hydrated by the complex’s grey water). And yet it’s completely modern: Leonard, a strategic planner, operates his business through the use of technology; a nuclear family is not at the center of the home unit. Perhaps the most important thing is that the Florence Loft architecture is based more on the needs of the modern worker and family than tradition, allowing every bit of the space to be used to its maximum extent.

Adverse possession is a law upheld in all 50 states that allows a prospective owner (“buyer” is not the right word) to move into an unoccupied property, apply for ownership under the law, and eventually have legal ownership of the property. The resident must occupy the home for several years (duration varies from state-to-state), pay property taxes and not have the actual owner press charges and kick him or her out. Easy breezy.

With a generous supply of unoccupied, foreclosed homes, the past few years have seen a spate of adverse possessions cases in the news. One such case was Kenneth Robinson (video above), who moved into a large Texas house, filed the appropriate paperwork, put up a “no trespassing” sign and called it home.

Neighbors were none too pleased. ABC news explains that because evictions are civil matters, not criminal ones, neither neighbors nor the bank who owned the property could call the police and kick Robinson out. In the interview, Robinson stated his plan to live in the property for three years (sans running water and electricity, mind you) before he became the rightful owner under Texas law.

Another notable case was Andre “Loki” Barbosa who took up residence in a foreclosed, 7500 sq ft, $2.5M Boca Raton home last July. In Florida, in order to take possession, Barbosa (who takes his nickname from the Norse god of mischief) had to stay there an epic seven years and pay $39K/year in taxes–probably not an easy task for Barbosa, a Brazilian national whose career is described as “aspiring rapper.”

Apparently, there are major legal hoops to jump through for a property holder (in both of these cases, the bank) to evict an adverse possessor. That is why it took about eight months for Robinson and Barbosa to get booted from their respective homes.

Adverse possession does promote doing more with less. It frees up finances. It transforms unused spaces into functioning homes. It promotes energy efficiency as it seems like setting up utilities in a squatted home is tricky. And because residency is so tenuous, we imagine the adverse possessor has few actual possessions to weigh him or her down in the event of an unexpected move.

As attractive as adverse possession might be, many might find more traditional forms of home possession more appealing. People who like knowing that they can occupy their home one day to the next, who don’t like seriously pissing off their neighbors and who like running water and electricity might find adverse possession inconvenient.

Breather works by using excess capacity real estate (mostly unused office spaces to begin). With Breather’s smartphone app, users will be able to locate these spaces and reserve on the spot. Entry to the spaces will happen via keyless locks. Each room will be held to a set of standards that either Breather or the host provides; those standards include cleanliness, quiet, high speed internet, a desk, couch and “enough room to do yoga.”

Like Airbnb and other peer-to-peer services, Breather depends on reputation to run smoothly. Hosts are rated by users to make sure spaces are well maintained. Users are rated by hosts and Breather’s cleaning crews to rate how they respect the space. In fact, Breather’s existence will depend on reputation as its network will be expanded with invitations by existing members who vouch for new ones.

“99% of most cities are completely inaccessible,” says Julien Smith, one of Breather’s founders. He explains that most cities are broken up into public or private spaces. The problem is that both public and easily-accessed private spaces like coffee shops and hotel lobbies aren’t the kind of places to relax or be productive. Moreover, the vast majority of appropriate private spaces–offices, unused residential spaces, etc–are simply off limits to the public due to logistics (i.e. letting people into a space) and liability (letting the wrong people into a space). By creating an infrastructure that allows the public to easily and safely access private spaces, he sees Breather as creating a new type of space in between private and public. ”Our whole idea is to democratize the city,” he explains.

Right now, Breather is only accepting invitations for membership. One of their partners Lockitron has not yet delivered the locks necessary for Breather to operate (they are expected in the next 45 days). The first launch of Breather will happen in New York City in October. The network will grow from there to select cities.

Hourly pricing has not been set. Smith says that will depend largely on the market, e.g. an hour in Midtown Manhattan will cost more than downtown Pittsburgh.

Similar to Zipcar, which provides cars for very short drives, Breather provides a place to, um, take a breather for only as long as you need it–no need to pay for an overnight stay or whole day pass. As they say on their site, “Think of us as your second home or office, wherever and whenever you need it.”

We see Breather as another important innovation in the sharing economy. It is helping create a world where it’s possible to have access to anything we want–whether it’ a car, a kitchen, or a power drill–whenever we want it, all without personal ownership or the inefficiencies of single-owner use.

images via Breather