10 REMB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020age and library shelves. When sealed, it’s a
sleek TV console with shelving and a Scan-
dinavian aesthetic; when it opens, with the
aid of a low-profile track system, it splits
down the middle to create an office nook
with a retractable desk on one wall and a
bookcase and standing-desk setup on the
other.
“People are expecting more from their
space,” said Hasier Larrea, the company’s
founder and chief executive, on a video call
from his one-bedroom apartment in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “But square
footage is the most expensive thing out
there.”
That has always been true in big cities,
but work-from-home policies and the uncer-
tain prospect of a safe daily commute, even
years after the virus recedes, has been a
boon for the company, Mr. Larrea said.
“This is not only in New York, San Fran-
cisco, Boston — we’re seeing this from Boi-
se, to Minneapolis, to Houston,” he said, not-
ing that their bookings have “quadrupled”
from last year, without specifying sales, and
that clients have purchased the company’s
furniture in over 15 cities, mostly in rental
buildings.
Bumblebee Spaces, a San Francisco-
based company that creates modular beds
and furniture that can be suspended from
the ceiling with heavy duty straps to maxi-
mize floor space, has also seen growing in-
terest, said Sankarshan Murthy, the chief
executive and co-founder. The products also
have software that can keep track of the
items being stored.
“What changed is that people spend more
time at home,” Mr. Murthy said, and they
“realize that traditional architecture is bro-
ken.”
For the most part, the companies do not
sell directly to consumers, but to property
managers looking to maximize the use, and
appeal, of studios, one-bedrooms, and
sometimes bigger units. In a multiunit deal
with a property owner, an Ori assemblage
costs $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. Bumblebee
Spaces sells its floating bed and a few stor-
age units together for about $10,000 to
$40,000, depending on the installation and
product mix.
That could change as the companies
ramp up efforts to sell to residents.
It can be a hefty commitment: Ori’s king-
size “cloud bed,” a mechanical bed frame
that can be raised into the air like a canopy
to reveal a built-in sofa or desk, takes up 78
square feet, weighs about 1,140 pounds, and
needs roughly eight-and-a-half-foot ceiling
clearance. The retail price hasn’t been set,
but for condo buyers, it could range from
$10,000 to $20,000 — more than some mid-
size cars.
But in markets like Manhattan, where
apartments cost an average $1,532 a square
foot last quarter, and studios sold for a medi-
an price of $495,000, the company is betting
the math will pay off.
Healthier Buildings
The most important changes in apartment
buildings are likely to be the least appreciat-
ed: systems to sanitize surfaces, diffuse vi-
ruses and assuage resident fears.
There is an industrywide push to refine
and better circulate the air in common ar-
eas, elevators and lobbies to reduce the
spread of the virus, said Douglas Mass, the
president of Cosentini Associates, a build-
ing systems engineering firm.
The aim is to raise the ventilation stand-
ard to MERV-13, an air-filter rating consid-
ered efficient, but not perfect, at capturing
airborne viruses. By comparison, your typi-
cal window air-conditioner has a MERV-8
rating or lower, and hospitals use so-called
HEPA filters above MERV-16. In all cases,
most experts agree that there is no substi-
tute for social distancing and face cover-
ings.
Still, the majority of big-city housing
stock is too old to support the higher filtra-
tion standard, because the thicker filters re-
quire more air flow, and only buildings com-
pleted in the past 20 years or so can easily
make the upgrade, Mr. Mass said. Instead,
many buildings are making incremental
changes elsewhere, especially in the tight
confines of elevators.
Thyssenkrupp Elevator, one of the larg-
est elevator manufacturers, has begun in-
stalling air systems that pull in purified air
straight from the elevator shaft. In another,
the air is treated with ultraviolet light (pas-
sengers are not exposed) and hydrogen
peroxide that neutralize bacteria, mold and
viruses. One model introduces ionized par-
ticles into the cab to disinfect the air. The
products range from $3,500 to $4,000 per el-
evator.
They have devised a smartphone app
that lets users call an elevator without
pressing a call button, and also sell a low-
tech alternative: “toe to go,” a foot pedal in
lieu of buttons at the base of the elevator.
“These were not on the radar whatso-
ever,” said Jon Clarine, the company’s head
of digital services, noting that Covid accel-
erated the release of several products. But
the speed at which some of these technolo-
gies were deployed demands more scrutiny,
said William P. Bahnfleth, a professor of ar-
chitectural engineering at Penn State, and
chair of the epidemic task force at the Amer-
ican Society of Heating, Refrigerating and
Air-Conditioning Engineers.“It sounds more like marketing to me
than science,” he said of some claims about
ionization and other products. “The ques-
tion is, ‘How much risk is there, and how
much do these mitigate it?’ ”
They are nevertheless in demand. Adam
Berenson, the vice president of Dermer
Management, a property management
company, just installed a similar ultraviolet-
light system for $5,000 in the elevator of a
prewar co-op in SoHo. Many of the loft
apartments open directly to the elevator,
and residents were concerned with lobby
air seeping into their space.
“I don’t think Covid is going away any-
time soon,” he said. “And I also don’t believe
that this is going to be the last one.”
And don’t be surprised to see the building
staff donning what look like the proton
packs from “Ghostbusters.” More com-
monly seen in hospital settings, building
managers are beginning to use electrostatic
sprayers, a battery-operated pack and fog-
ger that positively charges the particles of a
liquid disinfectant to coat surfaces more
evenly.
Alex Elkin, the owner of Eastbound Con-
struction based in TriBeCa, has begun using
the foggers in high-traffic areas like pack-
age rooms, gyms and bike storage. It’s an
incremental part of the new normal, he said,
but he has reservations. Without regular
maintenance or application, many of these
additions are ineffective, he said, and even
the best regimens should not instill absolute
confidence.
Without proper precautions, he said, “the
reality is none of these things is going to
protect you if you’re sitting two feet away
from someone.”Amenities
Developers have used deluxe amenities to
help justify shrinking apartments and
record prices in recent years, and now mil-
lions of square feet of residential spas,
lounges and playrooms are collecting dust,
because of state restrictions or resident
trepidation.
“Post-pandemic, everything has
changed,” said Rebeca Park, the lifestyle di-
rector with Extell, a prolific condo develop-
er in New York.
At One Manhattan Square, an 815-unit
skyscraper on the Lower East Side that
lured buyers with over 100,000 square feet
of amenities, Extell has begun using a res-
ervations app to regulate timed visits to
spaces like the private bowling alley, bas-
ketball and squash courts. (The hammam,
whirlpool and several other perks remain
closed, because of state restrictions.)
Several property managers said they had
adopted similar apps to manage their com-
munal spaces, but ongoing limitations on
capacity could mean a shift in the types of
perks that developers and residents prefer
in a post-Covid world.
One likely beneficiary is touchless tech-nology that uses key fobs or smartphones to
unlock doors. In the third quarter, sales at
Latch, the touchless door operating com-
pany, were 50 percent higher than the same
time last year, said Luke Schoenfelder, the
founder and chief executive.
“We’ve surpassed our expectations,” he
said, noting that the company booked $100
million in sales last year, and is on track to
exceed that. A new partnership with
Google’s Nest thermostat will also allow
residents or landlords to remotely change
the temperature or unlock doors with the
same app.
At the American Copper Buildings, a lux-
ury rental project on the East Side of Man-
hattan completed in 2017, several tech-for-
ward amenities, like keyless apartment en-
try and destination dispatch — in which the
elevator is summoned from a panel outside
of the car — could become more common-
place, said Marc Kotler, a senior vice presi-
dent at FirstService Residential, which
manages the building.
The virus has also reinforced the idea
that some services should not be consid-
ered amenities, but utilities that are essen-
tial. Rachel Fee, the executive director of
the New York Housing Conference, a hous-
ing policy and advocacy nonprofit, will ask
the city to underwrite the cost of Wi-Fi in
new affordable housing projects and public
housing renovations.
“Think back to the spring, to everyone
who needed access to unemployment bene-
fits, and to remote learning,” she said.Apps and Data
Many of these new features will bring big
data to bear on a typically pen-and-paper
industry.
RXR Realty, a large development and
management company, has created the
RXO app, a concierge service and commu-
nity forum for its residents that can be used
to pay rent, request maintenance, book
amenities, and chat with the staff, among
other things.
It was used to great effect at Harbor
Landing, a luxury rental in Glen Cove, Long
Island, where neighbors received an alert to
sing “Happy Birthday” to a young boy hav-
ing a socially distanced backyard gather-
ing. It can also monitor the number of peo-
ple registered to enter the gym, for in-
stance, and restrict access to those who ha-
ven’t made reservations.
There are more practical applications for
the industry. Scott Rechler, the chief execu-
tive of the firm, said that, based on dozens of
criteria — how often you parked your car, or
checked your mail or received guests — it
could help predict, with 80 percent accuracy
so far, whether you would renew your lease.
The program is still in development, but is
being tested in three rental buildings, with
plans for a broader rollout next year.
“We’d been sort of flying blind as an in-
dustry for so long,” Mr. Rechler said, but
this kind of data collection, which he said
was anonymized, could cut costs and help
anticipate residents’ needs.
Another program, called “computer vi-
sion,” that the company plans to introduce
this month, will use new technology to de-
termine whether people observed on sur-
veillance are wearing masks and social dis-
tancing in common areas, to help alert the
staff about noncompliance. So far, it’s being
tested in the company’s commercial proper-
ties.
Some worry that similar tech can over-
step privacy boundaries, especially as it
moves into lower-income developments.
Last year, three congresswomen, including
Yvette Clarke representing parts of central
and south Brooklyn, proposed legislation
that would ban the use of facial and biomet-
ric identification technology in public hous-
ing.
“I am in full support of innovative tech-
nologies, but we must work to ensure the
proper research and testing goes behind it,”
Ms. Clarke said in a statement. “We need to
be very mindful of under-researched tech-
nology that can be harmful for vulnerable
communities.”Covid Shoves the Industry Ahead
Above, in Mr. Larrea’s
apartment, a bed descends
from the ceiling when it’s
needed and conceals the couch.
Bottom left, the pool at the
American Copper Buildings in
Manhattan, where residents
must make an appointment
through an app to use it.
Bottom center, Al Shehada, the
general manager there, using a
key fob to interact with a
destination dispatch elevator
system, located outside the
elevator cab (and a detail of the
buttons). Bottom right, the
private bowling alley at One
Manhattan Square, a luxury
condo on the Lower East Side,
where residents can reserve its
use through an app.PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEFANO UKMAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES‘People are expecting
more from their space,’
one expert says.Left, a shelf system that splits
down the middle and reveals an
office nook when it is open, in
the Williamsburg apartment of
Hasier Larrea, founder and
chief executive of Ori, a
provider of space solutions.
Below right, an electrostatic
sprayer cleaning a room in a
Park Slope condo. Center right,
an ultraviolet light wand
disinfecting elevator buttons at
the same condo.CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1