Yo! Home's space-saving hidden features roll four rooms into one

Yo! Home's space-saving hidden features roll four rooms into one

Creating homes in cities where space is increasingly at a premium requires original thinking and Yo! Company prides itself on just that. The firm has unveiled an innovative apartment dubbed the Yo! Home that makes the most of its limited space.

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This demand for space is happening in cities around the world and means we're seeing more and more clever designs employed to make living spaces as efficient as possible. Spamroom's Micro-Apartment Moabit in Berlin, for example, splits the available space with a multifunctional central unit. Didomestic features a drop-down table and benches and a trap door dressing room, while Kitoko Studio's Paris Maid's Room uses sliding units to make the most of available space.

Like the Paris Maid's Room, the Yo! Home design uses hidden features that slide or emerge from different parts of the apartment. The features appear more integrated into the apartment's day-to-day workings, though. When not in use, they invariably provide a second layer of functionality.

The 40 sq m (431 sq ft) two-room apartments are built using a modular approach at the company's UK-based factory. Each box-like shell moves along a production line with features being added, before being loaded onto a truck for delivery. The units can then be stacked to create blocks of apartments.

One room in each of the apartments is used as a bathroom, with the other room used as a combined kitchen, living, dining and sleeping space. The apartments feature a sunken seating area that betrays the space that is available below the floor. A projector screen, meanwhile, lowers from the ceiling to turn the seating area into a cinema-like space.

Adjacent to the seating area, trapdoors in the floor open up to reveal large storage spaces. When access is not required to these spaces they can simply remain closed and form part of the floor.

Similarly, two other sections of the floor lift open and fold right back to form benches. From the space in the floor between the benches, lifts a dining table. As with the storage spaces, when the dining table is not in use, it can simply be hidden away to create more space in the apartment.

The kitchen itself is built into the wall and can also be hidden away using just a sliding door. It incorporates a washing machine, a cooker, a sink, and storage space.

Perhaps the most impressive trick employed by the Yo! Home apartments is the use of a bed that is raised to the ceiling when not in use. When stored like this, it actually creates a ceiling and lighting feature. When required, however, it lowers over the sunken seating area, which, of course, is unlikely to be required at the same time. It's raised and lowered using a motor, but this can also be done manually in the case of a power outage.