- A San Francisco startup designs modules that store your bed, closet, desk, and nightstand in ceiling modules that can be lowered on your command.
- Bumblebee Spaces has four projects planned with San Francisco developers, one of which has two-bedroom apartments that can be turned into three-bedrooms - thanks to the startup's tech - available for around $5,000.
- Dubbed The Landing, the apartment project also offers a rare perk to tenants to rent out their units on Airbnb when they're not in use.
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For $5,000 a month, you can rent a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood whose furniture stored in the ceiling transforms it into a coveted three-bedroom unit.
It's all thanks to Bumblebee Spaces, a San Francisco startup that "unlocks" living space by storing furniture, like beds and closets, in automated modular ceiling systems. The company caters its product to high-density markets where "space is a premium."
Its hometown of San Francisco unequivocally falls into that category - demand for housing drastically outweighs the city's existing supply, hiking up living costs as a result.
Bumblebee Spaces has four projects planned or in the works in the city, as well as in other cities like New York. One of them is in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood a few miles south of downtown. The Landing apartment building offers one, two, and three-bedroom apartments - priced between $4,200 and $8,000 a month - and is currently accepting applications. Cofounder Sankarshan Murthy told Business Insider that Bumblebee's systems are rolling out inside the two-bedroom layout at The Landing. But since the systems are modular, they could eventually be installed in other layouts as well.
And as the San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Said reported in 2019, The Landing is also offering tenants the choice to rent out their apartments on Airbnb when they're not using them. It's a perk that has been hard to come by in the city since pushback began against using precious housing stock for rentals on the home-sharing platform.
Only the first 52 tenants who request the ability to rent their units will have permission to do so for up to 90 days, according to The Chronicle. So if any of the selected tenants happen to be leasing one of the units outfitted with Bumblebee's systems, lucky visitors could experience the unique setup for themselves through Airbnb.
Here's what they look like and how they work.