Where living spaces are shrinking, innovative room concepts are needed: Microliving is synonymous with an urban lifestyle and smart mini-apartments. Sliding solutions enable great comfort within a small living area.
Swiss architects and room researchers from «kollektivorort» have devoted themselves to the subject of Microliving. In addition to historical and contextual classification they also examined the question of which structural/spatial means can help to give the “small ones” diversity.
You can get a comprehensive overview of Microliving and discover the creative impulses in the White Paper entitled “Microliving – Small but diverse”.
The number one trick to gain more space: replacing unwieldy hinged doors with elegant sliding doors. Our floorplan of a micro-apartment demonstrates how this works.
Saving space with sliding doors means planning rooms with care. Together with Nathalie Birkhäuser and Roman Venzin, first-prize winners of the Hawa Student Award 2020, we drew a sample floorplan that offers lots of flexible design options.
Singapore is considered the gate to Asia’s markets. The Hawa Experience Center has developed into an inspiration platform for architects and designers. In a short film, Stefano Mattioli, head of Hawa Sliding Solutions Asia and the Pacific explains how compact rooms can be efficiently used with sliding solutions.
Every day, more people move to the world's major cities. To keep quality of life high in such a high-density environment, far-sighted strategies for urban centers and intelligent forms of living are needed.
The Hawa Student Award 2020 went in search of precisely those things – and found them. The winning projects present ideas for small apartments and common rooms for the site of the long-distance bus terminal in the center of Zurich.
Hawa Student Award
They are compact, sustainable and often mobile: the phenomenon known as “tiny houses.” Following the saying “less is more,” these mini houses bring together all the necessities of life within a very compact space.
And naturally, many constructing engineers rely on sliding solutions from Hawa Sliding Solutions.
aVOID by Leonardo di Chiara Mini-one by Rainer Borcherding
Central location, practical infrastructure, fair costs – Microliving enables many people to enjoy an urban lifestyle. At the same time, the trend offers tangible advantages for investors.
Single-person households are the most common type of household in Europe. New available apartments have been slow to capitalize on this development, however. Micro-apartments therefore represent a growth market.
Aside from living space, Microliving developments often offer furnished units, common infrastructure – from a game room to gym – and services for tenants. This enables higher rents.
Microliving follows its own rules: many people are intentionally looking for a temporary apartment, with time-limited leases. This makes it possible to offer an attractive mix of both tenants and pricing strategies.
Different factors are involved in financing Microliving projects compared to office complexes and apartment developments. This is one reason that investors would do well to consider micro-apartments, for diversification reasons.
Micro-apartments are not the same as student apartments. Instead micro-apartments are gaining in popularity among more and more target groups – business people, expats, seniors and travelers. So we've identified the key drivers of this trend.
The Hawa Sliding Solutions range contains products and solutions for sliding, folding and stacking up to 500 kg - on buildings, in buildings and on fully-opening furniture.
The Hawa Student Award is among the most prestigious awards for architecture students in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Microliving was the central theme of the 2020 competition. Check out the surprising solutions proposed by the next generation of architects for high quality of life within a compact area.