How a laundry room is shaping the homes of the future
At OBOS Living Lab, Norway's largest housing cooperative tests future homes at full scale, with real residents. The insights are used to improve living quality, develop better homes and new housing concepts. A shared laundry room shows why that matters.
OBOS Living Lab is located at Vollebekk in Oslo, where OBOS tests new solutions as part of residents’ everyday lives. Each floor has its own theme: shared spaces, sharing, flexible floor plans, new technology and housing services.
One of these shared spaces is a laundry room. Located at street level and visible from outside, it brings light and activity to the ground floor.
How OBOS learns what works
For Søren Secher, Manager of OBOS Living Lab, the laundry room is a textbook example of why the living lab exists.
And the most important lesson?
"That people rarely use their homes the way we think they will. When we observe how people live over time, we discover needs, habits and challenges that never come to light in surveys or workshops alone," says Secher.
But testing is only part of the ambition.
A place to test, learn and share
The ambition was to create a place that both the industry and policymakers could see new ideas come to life. Now AutoStore has chosen OBOS Living Lab for its first test of an automated storage system for the residential market.
Secher has one piece of advice for the rest of the industry:
"Test more and learn faster. We need more pilot projects, more collaboration and more sharing of knowledge. That's how we reduce risk and speed up innovation at the same time," he says.
Nine out of ten homes are already built
Ask what the industry may come to regret, and Gjertsen Ebbesen has a clear answer:
"We spend a lot of energy on new homes, and we'll keep doing that. But nine out of ten of the homes we'll be living in by 2050 have already been built. We spend far less energy on those. I think we'll regret not innovating more in the existing housing stock sooner," she says.
On 21 October, OBOS brings insights from OBOS Living Lab and across the organisation to Oslo Proptech Summit. As host of the Future of Work & Life stage in the OBOS showroom, OBOS invites the industry to explore how technology, collaboration and real-world testing can help create better homes, neighbourhoods and cities.
