Juno Design: Throwing Out the Playbook
When you hear “Think Different” you probably think of Apple’s iconic ads from the late 90s and early 2000s — a black and white video of change-makers and icons, the Apple logo and the Garamond typeface. Maybe your first computer, or just the excitement of technology’s next frontier in our hands and homes.
For me, working as an architect on the Apple Store since before it’s inception in 2000, the ethos, methodology, and expectations that came with Think Different went beyond the zeitgeist — they were part of my DNA and my everyday work.
During my time at Apple, our Stores evolved first from the initial clarity of Product and Solution Bays, coupled with the Genius Bar and The Theater; to the highly precise and machine-crafted stainless steel and glass projects which proliferated with the iPhone; to the current experiential retail of the Forum and Genius Groves in Apple’s iconic flagships around the world.
At Apple, we focused on craft, quality, and customer experience to deliver innovative consumer products, inextricably linked to a brand that people could love and trust to make their lives better. Nearly 20 years later, when I decided it was time to focus on something new, I wanted it to be something where thinking and designing “different” could continue to be my obsession.
Today, the product and design thinking that Apple strived to perfect has become more common in industries beyond consumer electronics, like software and cars. But one industry that has yet to embrace this consumer-centric ethos is housing development.
Bringing Design Thinking to Housing Development
When we set off to create Juno in 2019, we saw a need for homes that were actually built for the people living in them — their values, their needs, and their price points. Housing is most people’s biggest expense, but it’s often the decision that requires the most compromise and least reflects who they are. If I could be part of a team dedicated to delivering higher quality housing at a more accessible cost — that could be delivered in less time — I knew that was a problem I wanted to solve.
But we’d have to start by throwing out the playbook. Most multi-family rental developments are built on an individual project basis, leaving very little resource for R&D, and thus, innovation. Developers become focused on features that sound appealing but have limited value for actual residents and quickly become outdated, like rec rooms and rock climbing walls. So instead of thinking about incremental improvements we could make to the current system, we envisioned what it would mean to deliver an entirely new living experience.
We began by identifying the values that modern renters in cities care most about but are rarely accommodated: wellness, sustainability, convenience, and inspiring design. We thought about the undeniable moments that make you feel at home but are hard to find in apartments: lots of daylight, access to fresh air, celebration of natural materials, tall-feeling spaces, and facades covered by lush greenery. We combined those ideas with an obsession to accommodate the customer’s daily needs: adaptable and tunable lighting, storage with personalized interiors, quiet and energy efficient heating and air conditioning, and integrated digital services.
By bringing design thinking to housing, we were able to think deeply about the resident in a way that hasn’t been done before. It was important to us that Juno residents feel the intentionality of the space, like they’re living in a piece of crafted furniture. From the proportions of space to the resolution of architectural detailing, our goal was to create an emotional connection between the inhabitant and the built environment. And we felt a responsibility to the planet, our cities, and to the health of our customers to bring this experience to more than the privileged few. We vowed to democratize this level of design and continue to always push to provide better living to more people.
Designing a Platform
But the expression of quality we’re talking about at this cost doesn’t exist today for a reason. Real estate development is notoriously fragmented and inefficient, which makes it difficult to innovate. So instead of designing a series of pretty buildings, we set out to design a platform to design, deliver, and assemble exceptional living experiences, questioning every assumption along the way.
Creating a platform for end-to-end development requires three considerations: product, systems, and structure. First, we had to design a product people want. Next, we worked to create a level of design consistency which could fuel a manufacturing-like supply chain approach to fabrication and support that process with technology to actualize efficiencies in the delivery process. We then focused our components to have a level of precision and predictability that allows an orchestrated, just-in time delivery and assembly on site.
At the same time, every site is in a unique context, which requires the identification of those parts of the project that can be locally relevant to its neighborhood. For example, we believe community interaction is pivotal to a fulfilling and responsible urban experience, so each of our buildings’ lobbies will be designed to facilitate interaction between residents and the neighborhood it’s in. This creates challenges for our development system, but one’s we’re excited to solve.
Across Juno, everyone participates in the same level of design and systems thinking. Aside from the actual buildings, we worked together to design a business structure that would allow us to reduce the levels of risk for our partners and ensure that the efforts of those delivering the product would always be optimized. We would need to design a digital backend system to contain all of the building information, specifications, costs and installation procedures, and force adherence to our digital twin from site selection through building management. Additionally, we would need to partner with some of the best minds in the industry, and ensure that we had true alignment along the entire value chain.
The Juno Design Process
How does one start to design through this challenge? It begins with a framework to organize and bracket the system. One must constantly look at both the macro and micro scales simultaneously, balancing how a resident will engage with the space, how materials will be installed, and the optimal organizing grid to structure the space.
Once we knew what kind of experiences we wanted to create for our residents, we began the design process by researching every material and framing system available, considering material optimization, waste, digital fabrication potential, and sustainability. We designed a way to leverage structural timber that both maintains small and lightweight member sizes and allows for us to use less material than ever before possible. To reinforce the sustainability of our building materials, we importantly decided to reveal the beauty of the wood, and not pay typical additional costs to conceal the expression of the structure.
One of the keys to our design was to create a series of dwelling units that were made from precisely the fewest number of individual components. They had to achieve above average development yields on any given site, but still feel bigger, and more gracious when one walked through the front door. Each and every part was forced to contribute to the whole. Less became more. The struggle to achieve simplicity through the complication of circumstance, building codes, cost drivers, and competing personal aesthetics was the challenge. We made key decisions like organizing the utilities into consolidated troughs, allowing for off-site fabrication and simplified points of connection. This move also allowed us to keep the ceilings high and penetration-free for better sound isolation. We combined the beautifully clean ceilings with concealed ambient and tunable lighting to deliver a unique and rich ambiance to the spaces.
Next we brought an engineering mindset I had learned at Apple to allow building components to be installed next to each other, but exist independently- allowing for future modification of one part without impact to its neighbor. This approach is critical for rapid iteration and revision over the life of the program, ensuring a nimble and flexible ability to encourage feedback and improvement.
A prime application of this mindset is our approach to how living spaces are divided. Within the Juno residential units, we have minimized the role of walls wherever possible. Instead, we have designed a series of components that divide space, provide built-in storage and serve a purpose on just about every vertical surface for the resident. Each of these components occupies a standard and regular footprint of space, but provides a rich variety of personalization to the occupant. At the same time, these items are fabricated and installed such that one can be removed without impacting its neighbor — for interchangeability between unit types, building maintenance or future renovation. Because the system of millwork components is standardized and repeatable, we were able to partner with a fabricator that typically only builds commercial cabinetry, but because of the rigor of our thinking, we were able to take advantage of their industrialized fabrication capabilities and deliver a much higher quality product at our cost-competitive budget.
This modularity of components and the flexibility of independent assemblies was highly influenced by my time working with retail systems at Apple. If done properly, designing an individual project that is a part of a greater program or platform allows one to capture efficiencies and create a flywheel of benefits for both the first project and especially the future buildings within the roll-out. One learns to prioritize where to integrate systems and where to isolate. Spending time in shopping malls across the country, i learned the beauty of independent column grids and demising walls that allow unique tenants to customize and eventually reconfigure space over time. I also learned that modular display systems created a path for an agile retailer to constantly address where the customer was going and not just where they had been. Allowing the application of lessons from other industries will situate Juno to be able to constantly react and anticipate the needs of our tenants.
The Promise of Value Innovation
At every step we come back to the idea of value innovation, or the idea of pursuing product differentiation and lowering cost simultaneously, creating a leap in value for both businesses and customers. Every design decision we make strives to improve the user experience and, at the same time, drive an optimized delivery model. For us, it’s not what you build, but what you don’t build that matters. We have researched materials, technologies, and techniques to create a unique recipe that has the ability to appeal to both the customer and the developer. Our goal is to not compete, but to discover what others haven’t bothered to find.
