Combining centralized shared spaces like a conventional hotel and the mobility of a catamaran, this award-winning hybrid combines elements of community and seclusion on the water.

Each individual unit comes with a standard living room, kitchen, bathroom and sleeping loft as well as deck space and a driving area for taking your space around a lake or sea. Meanwhile, the lobby structure bridges the gap between land and water and provides reception, restaurant, event and cafe spaces. Design themes also create a connection between the modules and the whole, including wood slats and white surfaces.

The rear-facing deck provides space for sunbathing and fishing, while also framing uninterrupted views of nature. Side and front windows can be closed off for privacy, or opened when venturing out on the open water with no nosy neighbors around to sneak peaks inside.

Designed by Salt & Water, the approach won a 2015 Millennium Yacht Design Awards for innovatively integrating architectural and nautical systems to create a unique experience for guests. Like the Botel, this remains a conceptual design for now, but clearly something is in the water since firms keep coming back to this novel combination of ideas.

If various aches and pains or a childhood fantasy about being an astronaut make you wish you could sleep in antigravity, here’s a way to make it happen – sort of. A group of architecture students at the AA Visiting School Slovenia have designed a ‘levitating’ suit suspended from ropes so you can find out what it feels like to sleep in ‘3D.’

The suit is essentially a bunch of mini hammocks that support individual parts of the body, including the feet, knees, hips, arms and neck. Pulleys allow the wearer to adjust the ropes to distribute their weight in whatever way feels most comfortable, so you can recreate your favorite sleeping position in mid-air.

It’s part of a project called KSEVT Hotel, which invites visitors to spend a night at the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies in rural Slovenia. The experience is meant to replicate what it feels like to sleep in space, minus the straps that astronauts use to keep themselves from bumping into things in the night.

“The site-specific added value to the KSEVT exhibition is the experience of levitation in an environment of gravity. The team’s field of research was the transition from conventional 2D sleeping to the experience of 3D sleeping.”

It’s an intriguing idea, and can probably be quite comfortable if you adjust all the ropes just right, but you’d better hope you don’t have to go to the bathroom once you’re strapped in.

While many individuals desire multi-functional and space-saving furniture, many cities want quite the opposite: an object that one can sit on but that foils attempts at anything from sleeping, littering and vandalism to street theft and drug-dealing.

Designed by Factory Furniture and named after the city for which it was commissioned, the Camden Bench is largely (and fascinatingly) defined in the negative, its creators boasting what it cannot do rather than what it can do, made to “resist criminal and anti-social behaviour.” It all sounds well and good in theory, but in practice: does this approach constitute  a public service or an unnecessarily prohibitive way to design urban furniture?

Made of cast concrete, the bench’s ridged top and sloped surfaces make it hard to lie down on and help keep skateboarders at bay, while its smooth finish is made to be graffiti-resistant. Its solid sides feature no slots or crevices in which dealers could hide drug stashes, while its slight recesses allow sitters to slide their bags safely behind their legs. Its smooth finish and lack of gaps also help keep it clean – dirt has nowhere to accumulate and water washes grime away.

As Frank Swain muses on Medium, “it a strange artifact, defined far more by what it is not than what it is. The Camden Bench is a concerted effort to create a non-object. [It] is strange kind of architectural null point. A piece of the city that by design will not interact with it in any way. It is a bench by the slimmest of margins – hardly comfortable, affording none of the qualities that would make it more than simply a place to sit. This is the bench’s sole concession to being part of the city, and it does it with the least conviction possible.”

Everybody knows that there’s no better place to take a nap than a hammock hung in a scenic location, but what about when you’re stuck at home, or at the office, or on a city bus? Instead of making do with an upright chair, the hard surface of your desk or a stranger’s shoulder, try these 15 nap-worthy (and sometimes ridiculous) loungers, sleep suits and head-supporting pillows.

Energy Pod

Among the perks of working at Google is escaping every now and then to take a nap in one of these bizarre-looking EnergyPods, which cost about $8K each. Reclined at just the right angle for optimal blood flow throughout the body, the pod has a visor that flips down to envelop the user in a private, soundproof space, and it even has built-in Bose speakers if you’d like to drift off to music.

Vitrea Living Tower

This classic design, first introduced in 1969, is an organically shaped seating tower that allows you to recline in a variety of positions. The unit can be used alone – either freestanding or pushed up against a wall – or put together to create a sort of seating cave.

Human Burrito

Turn yourself into a human burrito with the Blandito, a transformable pad for lounging in virtually any position you can think of. The pad can be rolled, bunched and scrunched in all sorts of different ways. The idea was to make the simplest possible product – essentially a sofa with no arms, legs, back or any real structure whatsoever – as multi-purpose as it can be. That’s achieved with just a little bit of fabric, foam and some elastic connectors.

DIY Hammock Bed

A fun twist on the conventional hammock design, this DIY creation is simply some net strung across an open space leading from one level of an office to another. Would you be able to get any work done if this thing was installed right next to your desk?

FEEL Seating System

Over 120 soft foam balls make up the ‘Feel Seating System‘, which can be bunched up in any number of configurations to reflect “the ever changing emotional state of the body.” Sit on it, lay on it, or wrap it around you like a cocoon.

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Luxe Lounge 15 Tempting Places To Take A Nap

In a bid to one-up the traditional fold-up Murphy bed, two companies are switching a wall-based storage approach for a ceiling-centric alternative. For those with higher spaces above but less square footage below, this design direction takes advantage of headroom while keeping clutter off floors and walls.

BedUp is a French creation that solves multiple problems with folding wall beds. First, as alluded to above, it shifts the burden to storage vertically rather than horizontally.

Second, however, the BedUp also can come to rest at various heights, leaving room for storage or full-sized furniture underneath even when deployed downward for use.

LiftBed is a German company offering an arguably sleeker-looking solution but it comes with a few catches. The cantilever that allows the bed to look like it is hovering, for instance, means more hidden mechanical and support elements are needed, in turn taking up more space.

That said, the resulting LiftBed looks clean, minimal and incredibly well-integrated with its interior surroundings, so if aesthetics are your primary concern, this approach may be the best.