Even the best Tetris player leaves gaps: making physical space efficient
As technology has developed, the real estate industry and its disruptors have tested and applied a myriad of approaches to making the most out of physical spaces. Some are now household names, such as Airbnb, which first enabled home occupants to lease out unused space, and subsequently led to its own industry of hosts and homes. In 2022, you can travel to many cities and towns around the globe and stay in an Airbnb which has been designed specifically for that purpose. However, Airbnb is just one drop within a wave of platforms collectively referred to as space-as-a-service, the sharing economy, or space intensification. This has heralded a new era of multi-purpose real estate which may serve as a workspace through the day, and a restaurant, a bar, or even a carpark at night.¹
Benefits of space intensification
Initiatives to make more use out of existing space have a number of benefits. For starters, making use of an underutilised space has obvious financial outcomes. In the case of DeskDog — a BrewDog initiative charging visitors £7 per day to work from one of their bars until 5pm — every once-per-week visitor is worth £336 a year (and likely even more once accounting for the beers they drink after work). Another benefit is a reduced need for new builds — preventing tons of CO2 emissions from the construction and occupancy of dedicated office spaces.
…but what about the efficiency of existing spaces?
Last week, a friend and I split the cost of a 2-bed Airbnb while attending classes for a university programme. We were impressed by the way it was designed — with elevated beds that provided each of us private space to relax, work and stow a week’s-worth of belongings. A pretty elementary idea for space-scarce Europeans, but indicative of a wider appetite to make the most out of the limited space at our disposal. Conveniently, a couple of days later I caught up with Wouter Merkestein, the CEO and co-founder of Laiout. Wouter and his co-founders Cristiano and Isak recently commenced the Pi Labs Growth Programme as part of Cohort #10, and their mission is to take space efficiency to an entirely new level.
You can be the world’s best Tetris player…
Wouter and Cristiano met in 2021 during their time with the Antler start-up incubator. During their 10-day isolation, they made the most of 2 hours per day of time outside — engaging in some healthy entrepreneurial sparring. After working with a number of real estate groups during the programme, their idea was formulated and Isak was onboarded as CTO. The Laiout team are now developing a web-based solution to automate the design of early-stage floor plans. This serves to salvage architects from one of their most menial tasks — running back-and-forth between stakeholders, revising floor plans in order to make them efficient, compliant, and within the ideal requirements of future occupiers. This could save as much as 20 weeks of wasted time revising plans, which results in six-figure savings on project costs. The output is a visualisation of all mathematically viable options for floor plan design at varying levels of space efficiency. Wouter uses Tetris as a way to simplify what Laiout’s all about:
“Even the world’s best Tetris player will leave some gaps. This isn’t the case for algorithms.”
The future of Laiout
Since pitching their product, big-name real estate groups have started paying a lot of attention. Beginning with office spaces, there’s no reason why the Laiout solution can’t also be applied in short- and long-term residential (hotels, apartment blocks, etc). The Laiout team have clearly put thought into their product roadmap, noting that later iterations in other property types can be built on the early work done in the office space. With floor space expected to double by 2060, the total addressable market for Laiout will only be growing in the years to come.²
¹ Poleg, D. 2020. Rethinking Real Estate. Palgrave MacMillan. Gewerbestrasse. p. 83
² Hageneder, C. 2020. Buildings and Construction: A sleeping giant for climate action. IISD Blog. Available at: https://www.iisd.org/articles/buildings-construction-sleeping-giant-climate#:~:text=By%202060%2C%20the%20global%20building,carbon%20dioxide%20(CO2)%20emissions
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