How a New DC Apartment Building is Using Robotic Furniture to Maximize Space

• September 29th 2017

by Nena Perry-Brown

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The DC apartment building that will feature an Uber waiting room is now offering another futuristic amenity.

The Vintage, an 85-unit apartment building in Mount Pleasant from Valor Development, will feature robotic furniture in a number of its studio apartments.

Ori, whose motorized origami approach to furniture UrbanTurf covered last year, has begun debuting their space-saving systems in ten cities in the U.S. and Canada.

Video demonstrating an Ori system at work in an apartment

DC became one of those cities because of Valor Development’s early interest in the technology. Having a background in engineering themselves, the founders of Valor reached out to the MIT team who created Ori when it was still in the conceptual phase, developing a working relationship that eventually led to The Vintage being an alpha testing ground for the Ori system.

A select number of studio units at The Vintage, averaging 500 square feet, will include an Ori system; Valor will share with Ori how renters respond to the system compared to regular furniture and offer feedback on how it can be improved.

The Ori system is pre-set to extend or retract a full- or queen-sized bed, extend or retract shelves, or sit fully-enclosed flush against the wall. It can be controlled from an interface on the side, the Ori app or Amazon’s Alexa voice control system.

“You move the wall back-and-forth and your living room gets twice as big as it typically would be, and then you move the wall the other way and your bedroom’s twice as big as it would normally be,” explains Valor principal Joe Bous. “You’re able, essentially, to recycle the same square footage for multiple uses.”

The Vintage will begin debuting studios with Ori systems on October 5th.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/how_a_new_dc_apartment_building_is_using_robotic_furniture_to_maximize_spac/13072.