ORI Movable Furniture | Hacker News Reader

ORI Movable Furniture

oriliving.com

76 points_squared_48 comments

If you get a kick out of optimizing small apartments, check out the YouTube channel “never too small”.

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.

https://youtube.com/c/NEVERTOOSMALL

I love that channel. I still think small apartments suck though, as is "moveable furniture".

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.

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while thanks!

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.

I honestly haven’t watched the rest of the channel, but the house tour of Binging with Babish’s home tour seems to fit what your looking for. Since the channel is named something to do with architecture all their tours might focus on the design and not the expense of it all.

https://youtu.be/ua0-5FZ2Eww

All the so called "small apartment" are medium or large size by Hong Kong Standards.

The first thing we are shown on this website: a bed descending upon a sofa and coffee table. And if you scroll down a bit, you will see it from the side.

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.

sure, as a piece of engineering it sucks, but think of it as the setup for a slapstick comedic scene that has not yet paid off.

I'm already envisaging a "Burnistoun - Voice Recognition Lift" skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAu-DDlINs

My wife would actually appretiate your first fiew points the opposite way - don't have shit laying around when you go to sleep and be minimalistic about decorating your rooms. I am not saying that I like the ORI products but I think your first points are just a personal preference. Having have mechanical contraption above my head would scare me too.

My first points are not that I want to use the space in such way - I too prefer to have it all clean and minimalistic. The problem is you *cannot* when you *need*.

Or the bed malfunctions while you're asleep and you get pinned against the ceiling. Or your secret office space behind your TV closes in on you because someone in a meeting shouts "hey Ori, close my office!"

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.

You can control them via a smartphone, so assume that it will in time be as leaky as a colander. Some domain registration will elapse, some cracker will find an exploit, some security flaw left in because of usability taking preference, something like that.

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.

Part of the problem with folding furniture is that it's a hassle.

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.

During the pandemic I learned that for me it’s very risky psychologically speaking to live / work / sleep in the same place.

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…

My personal experience is that it's okay for me as long as the desk is where you don't sleep and the bed is where you sleep. Low/no smartphone/laptop usage in bed also helps.

At the start of the pandemic, I would "build" my office every morning in the bedroom of our small apartment. We had a coffee table that would rise up to make my desk, I'd open up a folding chair, plug in my external monitor and laptop, etc. At the end of the day I tore it all down. It definitely helped me separate work from sleep even though they were in the same physical space.

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.

I would feel much more comfortable with that bed concept if the outer edge had steel cables on a winch mechanism, or posts with hidden ball screws.

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.

I was wondering how they expected customers to install some of these items in multi-unit buildings. At the bottom of the page it appears this is being done in partnership with property developers and not sold directly to customers.

I just clicked through their estimation tool,

  Cloud Bed, Sofa Edition (King) → $16,750
  Shipping → $340
  Installation → $2,213
  _______________________________
  Your Total Estimate → USD $19,303 (+tax)\*
  \*Monthly financing available

  Place a $100 reservation to secure your place in line. Once we've 
  received your reservation our Space Design team will reach out to 
  schedule your home visit.

That's an awful lot for a bed.

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.

[1] https://adultbunkbeds.com/loft-beds

At those prices, selling your apartment and buying one for 20k USD extra, with the extra few square meters of space, would make more sense.

Plus these designs really only work if you have control over your space. You couldn't install this in an apartment you're renting, where you can't e.g. rip out the carpet. If you're able to install this you're probably not living in a space where this would be a benefit.

Looks like their business model is to sell them to the developer, who then presumably passes a markup along to someone who buys a tiny but oh-so-fancy condo with Cloud Bed etc. Cut to Khaby Lame rolling up a futon...

I had a horrible experience with this type of stuff.

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

This stuff looks really cool in videos but as someone who owns some folding / roll-out furniture it's fucking annoying as hell. You have to have absolutely nothing in a room to make folding furniture work. Otherwise you have one little thing out and now it's in the way.

I can imagine. It feels like these transformable living solutions require you to adopt an ultra-minimalist approach to everything. Can't have a stray plant or fuzzy carpet. You have to obey the intricacies of the furniture.

In some situations and for some people I guess it pays off. Seems like a hassle to me.

It would quickly turn to hell if depression or burnout set in and you didn't have the energy to keep the place perfectly free of clutter. I suppose if you could afford a place with that kind of furniture, you could afford housekeeping, but you'd still have to deal with the time in between cleans.

It's a bit like living in a hotel, I feel. More of a place to sleep than a place to live. And for some people, that's just fine - I can see setups like this really work for people who spend their day at work and their spare time out as well. Might work for e.g. airbnb's, but you'll want something cheaper and more idiot / roughhousing proof for that purpose. And expats or contractors who need to be put up in an apartment for, idk, up to a year.

It's no longer viable if there's more than one person in a place like this though.

Yeah we use the folding furniture as a way to make the office a guest bedroom. So the few times a year we need it, I have to put most of the office junk into a trash bag and drag it into the garage so I can unfold the bed.

I feel like something like this only makes sense if you are someplace like New York, San Francisco or Paris. Not because property is so crazy expensive there but because you are in the midst of a density of people, places and things, so that makes it make sense to densify the interior of your home.

I'm not sure I can articulate it effectively, but I have looked at such furniture online and that's my tentative hypothesis.

San Fran struck me as not very dense when I visited.

it is in fact the second densest large city in the US

You must be taking some weird specifics here. Nothing I can see lists San Fran as second densest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Not really, I meant exactly what I said. It is the second densest large (> 100k) city (city proper, not metro area).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Not that specific

even in that regard it's third after New York City, and Paterson New Jersey.

Sure, still much higher than one might think from walking around. Certainly surprised me

More a testament to the ubiquity of sprawl in the states than anything I think

Yeah that's just it; I would have loved a tiny apartment with clever things like this ten ish years ago after I had just moved out, but only if it was affordable (<€500 a month at the time). Nowadays I live in a 'normal' house (two bedrooms, ~90-100 square meters) and I much prefer it.

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).

For that price you might as well just get a bigger space in the first place.

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)

This isn't yet available to consumers. Minimum is 10 items per address to even start a conversation to get pricing. It looks nice, but how much does it cost? How do I install it? Rather pointless unless you're a property developer.

The video of the bed descending upon the sofa and coffee table seems to solve the wrong problem: if you have space above your living room you can essentially build a stable bunk above rather than having the entire bed move up and down.

I considered that but you end up with the bed almost touching the roof which isn’t terribly comfortable.

True. At that point one may as well get a pull out sofa.

Then you cannot both use the same TV. Maybe the TV shoudl be movable instead :)

Reminds me of this Hong Kong apartment which can transform into many types of rooms.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/gary-ch...

I like these ideas.

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

Very cool engineering. However, it’s sad that this is the direction we are pushed towards, rather than finding ways to live with more space. We have plenty of space.

I love transformer furniture like this, ORI seemed like one of the more developed ones. But 57 buildings in 36 cities after 5+ years, the market for these seem a lot smaller than I thought. Assuming "buildings" are likely bespoke units and not multi unit contracts. Worse if buildings include 36 showrooms.

I may have seen too many murder mystery TV shows, but I can't help imagine bodies being found crushed beneath the lowered bed or inside a closed pocket office. What safety mechanisms are there to prevent accidents like this?

Gods, I'm glad they dont sell in my country yet. This is exactly the sort of house hack I'd be inclined to buy/build.

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