Designers use Apple Store inspiration to fix housing
Juno’s apartment buildings are treated more like a product than a project, which means they’re faster, cheaper, and easier to scale.
Most housing is built like a project—a one-off development with a job-specific team for a single location. BJ Siegel and Chester Chipperfield think housing should be built like a product, with all the R&D, optimization, and factory precision of a new phone or car. Using their product experience from working at companies like Apple, Tesla and Burberry, their new company, Juno, is aiming to make a product out of apartment buildings.
Founded 18 months ago, Juno has been stealthily developing a new approach to designing and building housing that could significantly reduce the time and the cost. Their intended product is a midrise rental apartment building, five to 12 stories tall, with 100 to 200 units. Designed to be fabricated mostly as components in partnering factories and assembled on site, the buildings will use environmentally sustainable mass timber for their structure and feature high ceilings and large windows for natural air and light. The company’s first project will be announced in the next few months, and they have “an active pipeline of thousands of units,” according to Jonathan Scherr, Juno CEO.
They’ve already optimized the design through a full-scale mockup in a San Francisco warehouse, which shows the building blocks of an elegant and simple building that is easily scalable to different heights and sizes, and easily built from a highly tuned set of components.
It’s a process that came straight out of the Apple Store.
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Most housing is built like a project—a one-off development with a job-specific team for a single location. BJ Siegel and Chester Chipperfield think housing should be built like a product, with all the R&D, optimization, and factory precision of a new phone or car. Using their product experience from working at companies like Apple, Tesla and Burberry, their new company, Juno, is aiming to make a product out of apartment buildings.
Founded 18 months ago, Juno has been stealthily developing a new approach to designing and building housing that could significantly reduce the time and the cost. Their intended product is a midrise rental apartment building, five to 12 stories tall, with 100 to 200 units. Designed to be fabricated mostly as components in partnering factories and assembled on site, the buildings will use environmentally sustainable mass timber for their structure and feature high ceilings and large windows for natural air and light. The company’s first project will be announced in the next few months, and they have “an active pipeline of thousands of units,” according to Jonathan Scherr, Juno CEO.
They’ve already optimized the design through a full-scale mockup in a San Francisco warehouse, which shows the building blocks of an elegant and simple building that is easily scalable to different heights and sizes, and easily built from a highly tuned set of components.
It’s a process that came straight out of the Apple Store.
Subscribe to the Design newsletter.The latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday