Driven by an artificially intelligent butler, this smart furniture system promises to free up valuable floor space by lifting and lowering modular interior design elements as needed, putting them into play or pulling them up to the ceiling on demand.

Bumblee Spaces has designed their bot to learn and adapt, anticipating needs in addition to responding to specific requests — it even scans items in storage then tracks their location for retrieval, helping you find stuff like lost keys faster. And if it’s raining, the roombot can also call down your umbrella in case you forget.

For some, it may sound at first like an overly high-tech solution without a problem, but anyone living in old city apartments knows that desire to turn slightly higher ceilings into something more useful, like raised shelving or other storage, at least (but even that only occupies the periphery). When things can be lifted out of the way entirely, even large beds are on the table (and tables, for that matter).

In the Bay Area, for instance, where the startup is based, the cost of additional square feet can be a lot higher than something like this making extant space usage more efficient. It also addresses the persistent San Francisco and Oakland challenge of moving from a smaller, rent-controlled unit to a larger, market-rate one, which can involve paying far more than the size differential alone would suggest.

“When I moved here I was overwhelmed by how much we were paying for so little space,” says the founder. “I come from a product background so I understood a lot about how we could densely pack objects really well. In the iPhone or Apple Watch we do such a good job of finding every micrometer of space to package all the features in so the user only sees the screen.”

Murthy applied this logic to furniture with Bumblebee Spaces. With modular furniture units installed in the ceiling a single-room studio can become a multifunctional area serving as bedroom, living room, study or wardrobe depending on the time of day. And the space given over to a retrofit can be small — as little as a foot of vertical in a room (with additional variability for taller items).

Bumblebee Spaces has also created a software library of their modules for architects, so they can fit them into reflected ceiling plans for future buildings. They aim to deploy a combination of ready-built furniture as well as custom-made items, all worked into a larger modular system. In the long term, they also aim to set up exchanges so people can buy, sell, lend and trade units to customize and redesign their interiors.

New Zealand architect Jonathan Smith worked with a cabinetmaker to carefully deconstruct part of this 1890s home in Auckland, then assembled a set of automatic doors as well as a moving fence to conceal a brand new garage space, all expertly retrofit into the historic structure.

The result is a high-level work of camouflage, preserving the exterior look and feel of the house while creating a James Bond-worthy disguise for the reappropriated space. Inside, a lift hoists one car up to make room for a second as well.

“We wanted to retain the character from the street so we cut through the joinery units to create two doors and then lined up the boards so you wouldn’t know,” explains the designer, who is also founder of Matter Architects.

Inside, a similar attention to historical details coupled with Modern refinements can also be found, with preserved brick surfaces complimenting new steel and glass elements. The garage, while central to the redesign, is just one of the tricks this house is now home to.

Out back, fresh treatments and extensions create a modern garden landscape, complete with outdoor fireplace as well as linear, structured wood and concrete space-shaping elements.

A Modernist classic, the famous Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe was originally built with a raised platform but that has not managed to save it from floods, leading its custodians to an extreme solution: jacking the building up when the neighboring river rises.

Per the Chicago Tribune, options under consideration include moving the home back away from the water’s edge or raising it permanently in place, but both of these (argue advocates of the third alternative) fail to preserve the structure in its planned context.

As ArchDaily reports, “The mechanism itself would use a series of trusses, which ordinarily lie flat on their side, but are raised to a vertical position by hydraulic rams when a flood is detected. The cost of installing the system is estimated at $2.5 million – $3 million.”

The cheapest option would be to move the house away from the river, but that, in turn, takes away its key views and a critical driver of its raised and cantilevered form – imagine, if you will, shifting Falling Water away from the river over which it sits.

The favored option might sound far-fetched, and raises preservation questions, like: what lengths should we go to in order to save widely-studied buildings, and how justified is their position in history books in the first place if their structural design features such flaws?

There are all kinds of houses designed to showcase your prized luxury vehicle or custom cruiser, but few can boast so blatant a mechanism to quite literally put your sports car on a pedestal.

Tucked into a hillside, the main house sits below the street level at which you drive up and enter, leaving only a driveway, walkway and deck visible from above … until, that is, you jack up your car collection two more levels into the air.

To be fair, this unusual architectural solution was designed by Atelier K (images by Kazushi Hirano) not to showcase the vehicles as such, but to simply make room for the owner’s Porsche, Ferrari and Honda on a narrow lot where a three-car garage or driveway was simply never going to work.

Inside, modern simplicity and regional minimalism influence the interiors within the house, which hugs and runs along the steep hill behind it. The result is a series of cozy, house-scaled rooms more practical and conventional.

Still, back up above, one has to imagine that at least from time to time it is tempting to hop in the top-stacked vehicle, push the button and ride up a few more meters for an even more amazing view of the Japanese city sprawled out below.

Floodwaters rise, drench homes, then recede, leaving disaster in their wake – a temporary change renders many structures permanently uninhabitable. But what if houses could ride out the storms, rising with the tides, then settling back down to the ground when the water is gone?

Based on the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Morphosis (along with Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation) has designs for new adaptive architecture, while the Buoyant Foundation Project proposes a system for retrofitting existing homes. The latter organization, founded by Elizabeth Fenuta (Alumni of University of Waterloo, School of Architecture) grew out of its creator’s Master of Architecture thesis project. Each approach would allow structures to do lift off the ground in an emergency and uses regional shotgun-style dwellings as their baseline typology.

BFP outlines a process that involves attaching buoyancy blocks below the home, connecting them to the sub-frame, and installing four corner guideposts to keep the building in place along horizontal axes while allowing it to lift (and settle) vertically on demand.

Connections to utilities (gas, water, power and so forth) would be either severable or extendable, so they could detach and reattach or simply expand and contract as needed. In plan, nothing changes – in elevation, predictable but periodic disasters are accommodated.