Can you help me? Starting a business is super difficult. I’m creating affordable live/work spaces for digital nomads.
I need to design some sleep pods: Prize for the winning entry: £500 or 3 months free accommodation at one of our buildings once the pods are installed. See some example photos below. (I get that the prize money isn’t a lot, but this isn’t me being cheap I promise, I’ve got about £45,000 to fit out an entire building, so in that context I hope it’s seen differently… hopefully I can reward you more in future).
So there are going to be private rooms for those who want them, but I want to be able to provide a super cheap accommodation option for those on a super tight budget (the bootstrapping startup option). I don’t want normal style bunk beds (as they lack privacy for those staying for a few months will undoubtedly need), I want something like a pod or a capsule, preferably with a curtain/closing door/blind like that used in pod/capsule hotels (if you look at the photos further down the page, or google pod hotels then you’ll get the idea pretty quickly).
I need some help to design some pods that’ll easily be replicable in different locations around Europe and hopefully eventually further a field. The designs need to be more than conceptual (they need to show the exact dimensions of each element, drawn in the equivalent of Revit, Rhino, Sketch Up or AutoCad etc).
Prize for the winning entry: £500 or 3 months free accommodation at one of our buildings once the pods are installed. Plus most likely a paid job for a few weeks (if of interest), as I’ll need people to help oversee the build / installation of the pods.
Deadline 8th January 2025.
Email me your questions to: hello <at> nomadhut.life (Hopefully you’ll figure this bit out <at> = @ and remove the spaces etc). More of a design brief below the following photo, I’ll add an FAQ as people email me for additional info.
Design brief (of sorts):
Budget per pod. Whilst I’m still building the company with my own money, my entire fit out budget for the space will be dependant on how much I get for a narrowboat I’m selling. So there might be a stage where I can spend more on pods once the space is making money, but initially I want to be spending under or around £1,000 – £1,500 on materials per pod (so the budget is low). So you need to think do I want to design a pod for future spaces, or do I want to help Ben open his first coliving space, that decision is for you to make.
They need to be stackable / interlock-able, even if this is done merely by adding metal brackets.
What size? I’m very sure I probably won’t be able to achieve anything quite as good as Nine Hours pods that is below, given my budget, but their dimensions are a useful guide for design purposes.
The other useful design consideration is IKEA mattress sizes in Tenerife (Europe in general) 90cm x 200 or 140cm x 200cm. So unless you can convince me otherwise I suggest we’ll match one of those dimensions, most likely the 90cm x 200cm for overall affordability reasons.
Similar to the loft beds / mezzanine beds in the private rooms, it’d be a missed opportunity not to use the steps to the upper bunks as storage.
In order to maximise pod height, providing luggage storage next to the pods rather than under seems more sensible, as in every building ceiling height matters. I’d like to be able to stack 3 high in the Tenerife building as it is 3.8m high ceiling.
In some rooms only side access to the pods will be possible, and in others it might only be possible to access from the top or bottom end of the bed in the pod… so it’d be helpful for there to be two versions of the same design.
We’ll need to ensure that there are both usb and standard 220/240v sockets in each of the pods. I hadn’t expected to see smoke alarms in each pod like above, but it makes sense and adds little real cost to the project in capx terms.
Posts, just in case I end up having to do the drawings designs myself I’ve started linking to different materials available in Tenerife.
