Home as a service, redesigned

Living as a Service has become an increasingly appealing value proposition for the many who want to cut the hurdles of settling down in a new apartment. As part of a project at Bundl, a corporate venture studio, we have worked on the value proposition and brand of a Living as a Service proposition for a Belgian corporation, and redesigned together the future of living.

Renting a place is not quite a linear experience — looking for the ideal place, closing a contract, moving in with owned furniture, buying new one, and contracting utilities. The process starts over again, as soon as you need to leave the apartment and move to the next one. Living in a house has become a cumbersome experience, especially in an increasingly nomadic young workforce.

In this context, in the past few years a new paradigm has gained steam: Living as a Service. Living as a Service solutions promise hassle-less living experiences by bundling the many hurdles of renting a place into one single service.

Approaching home rentals under this perspective unlocks significant systemic advantages, by leveraging virtuous value exchange between the participant parties — and beyond.

The furniture could be offered at discounted prices by furniture brands looking into exposure to younger audiences, allowing for path-dependence effects (people who loved their furniture in a Living as a Service apartment may end up purchasing the same later on in their lives).

Similar effects could be reached with on-floor shared items, like vacuum cleaners, drills, and sport equipment. While difficult to share in classic buildings, lacking both the spaces and the culture for product sharing, new buildings built with Living as a Service in mind could put product sharing straight into the design of the building itself.

The reflection around the topic of Living as a Service did not stop at the level of business modeling and value proposition definition. We looked further into the essence itself of living and into the historical trends of house construction, and redesigned apartments themselves from the ground up, making them best-fitted for sharing experiences.

For example, Living as a Service allows furniture (sofas, cabinets, beds, tables, …) to become much more than a simple cosmetic layer applied on top of a white box: crucially, furniture can be designed *together* with the apartment that hosts it, allowing for higher integration, space optimisation, stylistic coherence, and in some cases just whole new possibilities — think of plant holders built into walls, or washing machines cast inside ad-hoc designed cabinets.

In addition to the Systemic Design track, we run a Brand Validation track. We studied customers' tastes in terms of visual branding and tone of voice across a variety of selected audiences. Were our audiences more responsive to the communitarian appeal of Living-as-a-Service propositions? Or rather, to the luxurious and designy touch of the interiors?

As a result of our tests, where we experimented with 4 different brand directions for the Living as a Service proposition, we could narrow down to a minimalistic branding, that left space for the apartments themselves to express their identities.