USA: Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia launched the inaugural product of his latest venture samara – Backyard – which adds small houses to people’s backyards.
Co-founded by Gebbia and Mike McNamara, Samara started in 2016 as a Blue Sky product R&D team at Airbnb with the goal of thinking critically about the future of life. The team explored a wide variety of products along the way, but found that the most actionable and necessary business model centered around housing creation, which led to the creation of Backyard.
Backyard is designed to be a transformative and flexible dwelling, offering a clean, timeless design and customizable floor plans and colors that complement its primary residence. With flexible, multi-use layouts, Backyard can shift purpose and evolve with consumers’ lives, helping those looking to expand their families or creating a new source of income through rental space.
Initially, Backyard will launch in California as an inaugural market, taking into account the impending housing crisis and the rapidly rising cost of living in the state. With regulations already in place to facilitate state intensification, California will allow Samara to have an immediate impact on people’s lives as secondary suites [ADUs] are now considered a right of the owner by law.
With solar offset, additional living space, the ability to create new revenue streams through rentals and more, a Backyard unit can dramatically increase a property’s value while allowing residents to optimize the space outside their main residence.
Through the Backyard product, Samara sets out to improve the way we live, starting with reinventing the home holistically. The brand’s design products are a way to aspire to a “brighter future, balancing beauty, durability and simplicity”, according to its team, and offerings consisting of studios and one-bedroom units are built with precision using “highly durable, environmentally friendly materials” that are not readily available to most builders.
Additionally, Samara will seamlessly manage the end-to-end construction process, including surveying, permitting, unit fabrication and installation, ensuring that Backyards units are completed quickly, within limits. budget and with minimal disruption to consumers’ homes. Backyard homes are therefore designed to last a lifetime.
At launch, Backyard is available in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, with studios starting at $289,000 and one-bedroom units starting at $329,000, plus shipping. installation included.
In 2018, it was announced that Airbnb launch the Backyard home design initiative in 2019, described as “an attempt to design and prototype new ways to build and share homes”, and that its first test units would be distributed the same year.
In 2019, Airbnb hired Miklu Silvanto, a member of the Apple industrial design group to lead his Samara design studio project and more specifically lead the industrial and interaction design team at Backyard.
Meanwhile, in July this year, Gebbia write a public letter confirming that he was retiring from his full-time operating role at Airbnb spending more time with his family and taking on new projects.
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