Sliding Walls.

May 9, 2009 8:55 PM

Can anyone point me to good examples of the use of sliding partitions in an modern residential space?

I know there have been a few recent apartment designs that have utilised sliding walls to partition up the space in a flexible way, but I'm having trouble tracking them down. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction?

posted by arha to home & garden (5 answers total)

Here's an article about this very subject from the NYT. This design can produce 24 different layouts.
posted by beatnik808 at 9:26 PM on May 9, 2009 [10 favorites]

Hands down, that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Excellent link, beatnik808!
posted by LuckySeven~ at 10:41 PM on May 9, 2009

Fantastic link beatnik808! Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks so much.
posted by arha at 11:35 PM on May 9, 2009

In case you're interested in flexible layouts in general then you should look up the Rietveld-Schröder house, built in 1924. Probably one of the first houses built with moving panels to allow a changing layout. I can't find any good shots of the interior that show how the panels work, but perhaps with some more digging you could find it.
posted by bjrn at 3:15 AM on May 10, 2009

From personal experience, I rented an apartment in Amsterdam with one movable wall. It was pretty solid, had a track above and fair-sized industrial rubber wheels on the bottom. This wall was between the master bedroom and the smallish kitchen. If you were home alone you could open a door-sized path for snacking, if someone else was sleeping you could close it and work at the kitchen table while others slept. The big win was that if you had a dinner party and kept the bedroom neat, you could open the wall all the way and have a large dining room. The wall didn't just disappear of course, it was a long wall that would become half as long.

It was a great setup, I'd try to do something like that if I built my own house.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:23 AM on May 10, 2009 [2 favorites]