Making Room for Innovative Furniture Solutions in DC

• September 27, 2017

by Nena Perry-Brown

A rendering of a kitchen in the exhibit

As high housing costs and low inventory have altered the traditional household structure, design firms are taking notice and upping the ante on efficient layouts. This fall, the National Building Museum (NBM) is introducing an exhibit that will feature a 1,000 square-foot house displaying some of the latest in innovative adaptable furniture technology.

The Making Room: Housing for a Changing America exhibit will present a vision of housing solutions that will cater to three segments of the population that increasingly need living arrangements that cater to them: extended family households, roommates and elderly persons aging in-place.

Organized by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and presented in partnership with Resource Furniture and Clei, the furniture in the exhibit will be changed twice during its run to demonstrate the adaptability of the layout to each of the three living scenarios.

A number of other innovative housing solutions will be highlighted, including shared housing experiments in the DC area, co-housing experiments nationwide and phenomena such as tiny houses and micro-apartments.

“Households in the United States are changing, but housing supply and policy is not changing at the same pace,” Chase W. Rynd, president and executive director of NBM, said in a statement. “Making Room offers the opportunity to explore innovative design solutions to meet evolving lifestyle needs in today’s society, both through case studies and with the full-scale Open House that we are constructing in our galleries.”

The exhibit will run from November 18, 2017 through September 16, 2018; the “roommates” layout will be the first on display.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/making_room_for_innovative_furniture_solutions_in_dc/13062