NY, SF: Turn your junior studio into a 3 bedroom penthouse…

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… not really, but this is cool. One of the many projects coming from the nerdfaces at M.I.T. Media Lab is developing a“Room-in-a-Box” — way to expand and extend your home without actually expanding the physical space. Meaning if you have a 200 square foot junior studio, you can basically triple the square footage with CityHome, which is explained as:

The CityHome is an ultra-efficient, responsive urban home, providing a hardware and software ecosystem for personal space customization. A micro-unit apartment developed by Kent Larson’s Changing Places Research Group.

Now watch the video:

So if I instead had a 300 square foot studio, then would CityHome double the space? Does the CityHome prototype come in one size? Can one only add a finite 400 virtual square feet?

Larson assures us that CityHome isn’t just a concept, but a viable product, and he intends to bring it to market through either a startup or a commercial sponsor. And while it certainly seems like a promising solution to stretch a closet into a small apartment, CityHome seems even more attractive as a way to stretch any small apartment into a slightly more livable one.

I’d like to see this succeed. However, as useful and fun as CityHome is, I only see this developing into a niche product in the near term. I’m afraid Americans value their “real” space too much for this to succeed widely. Now if this was developed in countries like Japan or Korea, I could see this having a wider, broader appeal.

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