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Ori Pocket Office

oriliving.com

176 pointstroydavis67 comments

I know this is a subtle detail, but when I see this I fell neck pain. The ideal mounting height for the TV is such that when you are in your comfortable viewing position, your eyes should be roughly aligned just below the top part of the TV (for big TVs this is difficult so I aim for 20% from the top).

I've seen countless HGTV make-overs where they put the TV other the freaking fireplace - just horrible. This is slightly better, but still bad.

The idea is simple and not actually new; I saw a similar idea years ago where instead of a home office it enclosed a small bedroom with bunk bed. It seems it wouldn't be that hard to replicate for anyone able to make their own shelves.

I see where you're coming from, but in this case I think it's not too bad.

In the end I guess it depends on how you sit on your couch, but AFAIK the ergonomic guideline would be that your eyeline should be aligned to the top of the display.

Meaning that, if you're sitting on your couch, you're sitting slightly reclined, and the eyeline would be angled upwards. That's why you often seen the rule of thumb for home theaters "eye height = middle (or even lower third) of TV".

Incidentally - that's how I've rearranged my own viewing arrangement recently (raised the TV for ~20cm to make room for a well-positioned center speaker), and while being skeptical myself in the beginning, it has worked out great.

But yeah, TV over the fireplace is still terrible. :)

We’ve got our TV mounted near the ceiling, and tilted way down. Because we like to lie on the couch while watching TV. That’s about fireplace height, but you would still want it to be tilted down.

> But yeah, TV over the fireplace is still terrible.

I think it ultimately depends on the individual situation and layout. We had our last TV over the fireplace for 12 years. Our seating was ~15 feet away, and we did not need to crank our necks to watch TV.

I think I'd be much more critical of those things if I was 20+ years younger, when I was more into "home theater" than I am now, but my attiude nowadays is "if it works for you, who cares what other people think."

I feel you are one of us... https://www.reddit.com/r/TVTooHigh/

Not to mention that putting it above a fireplace is a great way to shorten the lifespan of the tv

I think it depends on a bunch of factors - how often you use the fireplace, whether it's a gas or wood burning fireplace, etc.

We had an LCD TV over our fireplace (gas, vented directly outside horizontally) for 12 years. While it just got moved in the past month, it's still going strong.

The ultimate instantiation of this concept is architect Gary Chang's childhood HK apartment that he transformed with this kind of concept throughout. This also pre-dates Ori, I believe as this is from 10-15 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB2-2j9e4co&noredirect=1

Looked for price, but it looks like a "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" situation

I look forward to an IKEA hacks version

Looks like IKEA had some kind collaboration with Ori, but I'm not sure if an actual product is / was available

https://newsroom.inter.ikea.com/news/ikea-and-ori-team-up-to...

Interesting, I think production by IKEA is the only feasible direction for producing and selling this as people's homes are too varied for any single configuration to work.

It looks very nice. I might be willing to spend ~1K on this but only if it exactly fits my needs, and even within just my current residence the window sizes and ceiling heights are dramatically different from room to room.

Speaking of which they should offer an ORI configuration where the back office wall is open to an exterior window so that it is more suitable for a corner room with two exterior walls.

From a cursory look, this is more a 10k than 1k piece of furniture. The hinged cabinets alone would cost significantly more than 1000$ (the materials aren't stellar, however, especially the laminate wood, ugh).

The introductory video is only a render, so maybe it's too early for them even to have estimated the price

Then this product would fail.

People with deep pockets can afford space.

Space is expensive in many cities. In my area, a 2 bedroom rents for around $2500. A 3 bedroom is more like $3500. So that's a $12k annual difference.

And now with remote they don't need to pay the premium of the city.

Came here to post the same. Does anyone know what this costs, and/or has anyone bought one and can speak to the experience?

This. I don't understand why people make websites purporting to offer products to the public, but refuse to provide basic information like price or how to buy the alleged product. Is this just a concept sketch?

Likely the same reason why developers, who purport to offer software on GitHub, don't always offer licensing/support contracts. This could be a proof of concept that someone has drawn up for their firm to gain mind share.

If you look at their main website it seems they mainly work with commercial developers: https://www.oriliving.com/

In the same way that I may have useful software on GH/GL but I only work for my employer. It's a "if you like what you see you and you're worth the time feel free to get in touch" kind of thing.

It looks like their business model isn't to sell to consumers at all, but sell to big urban property development. This implies they don't do one off installations, but negotiate to get these in many/all units in a new or renovated development. I'm sure they would build one for an individual condo unit or homeowner for the right price (which might look like the same price as a 15 unit installation or something...)

I think they missed an opportunity for a great product; let me explain.

You only needed to add the ability to "enclose" your office space with some sort of sound-proof film or panel, and voilà, a much more interesting piece of furniture.

The current Ori simply offers the ability to neatly "collapse" the "mess" of a home office, and substitute it with a wall-mounted TV piece of furniture. Ok, fine, but... Meh.

Instead, give me a chance to have a sound-proof bubble I can use for phone calls and video calls, so that screaming kids in the other rooms are not ruining the call, and similar issues. Then I'm interested.

good idea, except sound proof requires thickness and density.

no such thing as a sound-proof film, sadly.

Towel cloth is actually pretty good. Not a film, but quite effective when in layers.

Vynil-based films achieve that with very little weight. It doesn't have to be "audio recording studio" soundproof; even if it kills just 20-30 dB it is still a good improvement.

so... a room?

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO5laZ7CiIA

Video of Ori Studio Suite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiDT8Jp6LI

No captions on the video and intentionally disabled YT's auto captions? Completely inaccessible video for silent consumption or to the deaf and hard of hearing.

There's no voiceover on the first video. You're not missing anything but music. (The second video has an option for captions.)

I have two questions (after "cats: how does it deal?" which is answered in other comments, kinda-sorta):

1. Where does the chair go when the Pocket Office is closed? (Illustration shows a generic office chair: I'm not sure there's space in there for an Aeron, much less anything really funky).

2. What is this "work/life balance" the designers seem so keen on enforcing? (sarcasm). And why do they think that after a day spent staring at a monitor their users can only relax by staring at a different type of monitor (the kind where there are no input devices and some corporation provides the constant screencasts for a monthly subscription)?

Regarding your second question, we have a family room with a TV which doubles as a work-from-home office.. would be nice to be able to hide the office stuff when it's not in use. Also this design (depending on the size of the room) seems to still allow for use of the TV out of the view of the office space.

My point was, I'd be more impressed if there were options other than "glorified TV stand". (I may be unusual here but I don't really watch TV.)

You can see there's a cutout in the back for the chair, there's enough room for the chair in the air pocket when the office is collapsed.

These solutions always look slick, but in my experience, they work seamlessly only either in very modern apartments or apartments that have been re-built around such features in mind. I have yet to see a mass-viable product like this.

Love the concept, would pay $2-3k for this, would not pay $20k and a month of re-building my room to fit this in.

Yes, too expensive. People who live in $5k per month matchbox apartments in global alpha cities are not the type of people who buy luxuries.

Ask any high earner in a place like HK, central London, or Singapore.

They will wait for a cheaper Chinese copy.

At anything over 10k, you can get a perfectly good custom solution.

Source: the fact that I have a reputable, insured, etc. carpenter working on a floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelf rig all along one wall, with a fold-out Murphy bed style desk incorporated that should be perfectly fine as a work space. Total cost at big city prices: < $9k.

One of my major concerns when I see this kind of design is that they never talk about the target room size.

If the diagram is to scale, then from the specs it's suggesting a room of about 4m x 4m.

Looking at their other product the "Studio Suite" that one's diagram and specs suggest a room about 6m x 3.5m.

(Both are larger than my largest room.)

On their marketing page, they target landlords not tenants, with the suggestion that landlords should buy these and will then be able to charge higher rent.

The specs say it's 78"x75" (98"x75" for large version) when open. How much space you want beyond that is up to you I presume as it depends on your door position and layout of rest of room. If you just have a couch then that's probably a couple feet around for entrance and 4 feet for the couch. So roughly you'd want a 10' x 11' room.

An interesting consideration: using something like this might have negative tax implications. In Australia, you can claim home office expenses by one of two methods: fixed rate, or actual cost. As well as being very convenient, the fixed rate method is typically going to be quite advantageous (certainly has always been for me—my actual costs are quite slight), as it’s 52¢ of deductions per hour, which is about a thousand dollars for a full-time year. But to go with the fixed rate method, you have to have a dedicated work area—if it’s an area of the house that would already be being lit and heated or cooled or whatever, it’s assumed the actual cost is negligible. I don’t believe this thing would count as a dedicated work area, so if you file your taxes honestly it could easily cost you most of a thousand dollars of taxable income per year; depending on your income, this could effectively make using this office cost you $200–400 a year, compared with using a dedicated room (of course, if you don’t have a spare room to dedicate to the purpose—).

Source: https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/income-and-deductions/ded...

(This year there’s also a “shortcut method” which I presume is due to lots of COVID-19 working from home, at 80¢ per hour including all costs, so no claiming phone or internet costs on top of it as in the fixed rate method, and no dedicated work area required.)

So, one of my favorite ‘combo’ furniture designs is Joe Colombo’s Minikitchen from 1963.

https://www.klatmagazine.com/en/design-en/minikitchen-boffi-...

I feel like functional converting spaces like this are the future, or will have a huge part in it. As a species, we seem to love to congregate and squeeze ourselves together, which means we'll always have high population density settlements where space is at a premium.

This has been floating around design blogs for years, I wonder if over supply of tiny condos + covid is finally going popularize the design. Wonder what safety features there are to prevent people from getting crushed/trapped.

The video shows a safety feature which stops the motion if it bumps into something. Looks like it's just simple detection of excessive resistance to the drive motor. Maybe be careful if you have any small pets?

But can you easily differentiate between something which is pushed by the wall and something heavy that is on the shelf ?

Also granted you can, my instinctive reaction, the instinctive reaction is IMO try to get out, not push against the wall.

Seems to me it's not such a simple problem to solve unless you are ok with (i) some level of discomfort (ii) getting pets stuck inside and traumatised for life (granted the device does stop it's movement before crushing it).

Yeah I’ve seen pictures of similar things to this years ago. I seem to recall that the pictures I saw were from Japan. Is there a name for this type of construction? I tried to Google compact apartment and transform room but couldn’t find anything at a glance so I must be using the wrong terms.

It also reminds me a bit of storage lockers on rails that some libraries use, like this: https://www.southwestsolutions.com/ssg/moving-shelves-on-tra...

Iterations of this design show up in intro architecture design studios every year, Shortly after Italian smart furniture videos appeared on Youtube. I've seen many based off library rolling shelving as well, most older than aforementioned designs. Pretty natural conceptions for architecture student + student living + spending time in library + furniture design (easy to tackle small scale project). Of course after graduation, most of these ideas get dropped because (I guess) market conditions were never particularly fertile for these designs to take off. Even now with vanlife, micro living, I rarely see smart furniture like this in real life. Still extremely niche. I wonder if there's a term for multiple discovery / simultaneous invention for design ideas that gets spontaneously rediscovered due to very specific conception conditions but never material on mainstreet. Something sisyphean about it all.

Says in the video, 20lbs of force is sufficient to trip it.

I wouldn't worry about it crushing one of my cats but I would close it and then hear a plaintive "meow" from wherever it was sleeping inside :D.

I didn't even think about cats, I think I'd be irrationally paranoid at the sensors failing if I had small pets around. I'd want a gap at floor level as backup, maybe an aesthetically integrated cat flap. But I've owned remarkably stupid cats before who weren't very environmentally aware. Certainly taught me to close doors carefully and quietly.

I've shut mine in cupboards a couple of times where they've leapt in while I was looking the other way.

The best description of cats is furry toddlers than ever grow up.

This one has at least been delivered enough times to justify creating a "What to expect during installation" video for new buyers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d17RyUAjzNs. I don't know whether that's 2, 20, or 200 units, though.

Have seen concepts like this many times over the last decade. Have never seen any that made it to market. Assume they're piggy-backing off of Covid to test the market. Bored of it now.

Actively looked into it for a clever way to design a house recently. The closest we came to succeeding was to repurpose electronically/(or manually) movable library shelving. It's possible at a reasonable cost but needs lots of upfront research.

Interesting stuff, but these concepts annoy me in the same way as most concept cars do.

My current office pretty much looks like this, except that the walls don't move (I have a standing desk opposite my real desk: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/07/19/1630).

I quite like this setup, really, although I'd prefer to see some sort of rails (ceiling and floor) to make sure it doesn't topple.

This - toppling - was also my first thought. However on further examination I reckon the rail that it opens along will be pretty ferociously fastened and provide the required stability.

Awesome design. Does it have a hidden metal rails and some electronic for moving or is it all manual?

The animated graphics show button presses I think. So electronic.

Thanks, just saw the youtube one, also answer to my obstacle question (20lbs force) ...

I'm sad there is no animation of the up / down button on the controller.

I'd guess there is no up and the down face seems to be used for a few buttons with "presets" (bed, work)

If the office was closed, and I needed something out of the office cabinets, I would not like to have to open up the whole thing just to get the item I needed.

With the right size room, I would probably leave it accessible most of the time and only close it off when hosting guests or I otherwise need the extra space. Of course, if you have that size room available to you, you probably have better options than this already.

reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYV0qATsyts Is this maybe the above made into a product?

Where are the cables?

seems like a tough thing to get right if you live in earthquake country...

How much $

Neat

Hallowed.

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