Design Your Ideal Home with an App: VUILD Develops the Digital Home-Building Platform “Nesting β”

VUILD Inc., an architecture-tech startup, has developed the digital home-building platform “Nesting β” in collaboration with BIOTOPE Co., Ltd., a co-creative strategic design firm.
Today, the beta service has been released ahead of its official launch this summer, and recruitment of early users has begun, with the goal of building more than 10 houses within a year.

With “House for Marebito” (*), which received the 2020 Good Design Gold Award (Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award), VUILD tested an approach that completes fabrication within the region using the 3D wood-processing machine “ShopBot” and local timber, reducing the long-distance transport, environmental impact, time and cost that had previously been unavoidable.

Nesting β is a home-building platform born from the experience gained with House for Marebito. To help users realize their ideal way of living, it offers the experience of designing and building a comfortable, low-impact home themselves with digital technology.

[The home-building process]
1. Choose the land
Choose your preferred plot from sites offered by community hosts across Japan, taking into account the landscape and the community.

2. Think about how you want to live
Imagine your ideal life, with the study, studio, shop or workshop you gave up on in the city, and plan the way you will live.

3. Design the floor plan with the app
Draw the floor plan you need in the home-design app currently under development, and the shape of the house appears instantly along with an approximate estimate. You can adjust the floor plan while checking your budget and requirements.

4. Decide on housing performance
Determine the house specifications to suit the local climate. By choosing the type of equipment, the thickness of the insulation and the performance of doors and windows according to your budget, you can even build an eco-house or an off-grid house.
You can also choose the much-talked-about autonomous, decentralized water circulation system “WOTA BOX” (WOTA Corp.).

5. Assemble the house
The house’s parts are cut from local timber on a 3D wood-processing machine “ShopBot” located in the region. Under expert guidance, you assemble the house with family and friends, enjoying the process like building a plastic model kit.

About a year ago, when stay-at-home measures during the COVID-19 pandemic began to drastically change lifestyles and ways of thinking, VUILD and BIOTOPE began discussing future ways of living, based on their shared vision of “the democratization of creativity.”
For many people, the conventional home meant choosing a location and floor plan within the budget they and their family could afford, and gaining affluence by accumulating financial assets.

We believe that the key to a fulfilling way of living in the future is having room for spaces shared with oneself and others, and enjoying the process of creating one’s own kind of richness.
By envisioning and designing, according to how we like to enjoy ourselves, spaces such as an open kitchen where everyone cooks together or a space under the engawa veranda for making things, we generate richness through our own efforts, share it with others, and nurture time spent with friends. This way of living is the lifestyle we want to pursue as we open up a post-capitalist future.

As a first step toward that lifestyle, the first prototype home-building project with Nesting β will be completed at the end of September in Teshikaga, Hokkaido. After that, in collaboration with Share Village Co., Ltd., a cooperative village (five houses built simultaneously) will be constructed in Gojome, Akita, putting the approach into practice from individual homes to entire settlements.
In parallel, the home-design app will be implemented, with an official release planned for October.

Through these trials, VUILD and BIOTOPE will build a platform that realizes an ideal post-capitalist way of living.

▼Digital home-building platform “Nesting β” website
https://nesting.me/

▼Creating Homes for a Post-Capitalist Era
An omnibus series by Kunitake Saso (CEO, BIOTOPE) and Koki Akiyoshi (CEO, VUILD)
#6 Proposal: What is Nesting β?
https://note.com/sasokunitake/n/n70e556c57b50
Past installments
https://note.com/sasokunitake/n/n269800222b29

* About “House for Marebito”
“House for Marebito” is a building that attempts to update gassho-zukuri, the region’s traditional construction method, with VUILD’s contemporary digital technology. It was built in October 2019 in Toga Village, Nanto City, in southwestern Toyama Prefecture. Aiming to recreate “architecture built with the participation of local residents,” as gassho-style houses once were, we devised a construction method using small, light parts that even children can carry, and, by starting from felling unused timber around the site, attempted to build “on almost zero-yen land with almost zero-yen materials.” As a result, it received the Good Design Gold Award (Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award) at the 2020 Good Design Award as an ambitious work presenting an entirely new form of architecture.
https://marebitonoie.studio.site/

[VUILD Inc.]
Representative: Koki Akiyoshi (CEO)
Founded: November 21, 2017
Headquarters: unico 1F-A, 3-4 Nisshin-cho, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki, Kanagawa
Business: Architectural design, development and manufacturing of wood products, sales of CNC routers, digital talent development, business development support, IT service development
Website: https://vuild.co.jp/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vuildinc
note: https://note.com/vuild
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VUILD.co.jp/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vuild_works/

[BIOTOPE Co., Ltd.]
CEO: Kunitake Saso
Headquarters: 2B, 1-7-4 Ohashi, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
https://biotope.co.jp/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/biotope.strategicdesignfirm
Mail: info@biotope.co.jp