Making good use of a small room often needs clever thinking. Designs like the All I Own House and Kitoko Studio's maid's room conversion in Paris use sliding furniture to reconfigure space as required. A Tokyo bedsit does the same and to the same effect, but in a much simpler way.

Tsukiji Room H, designed by Yuichi Yoshida & Associates, has a floorspace of 47.6 sq m (511.8 sq ft), which is comparable to that of the All I Own House. It is designed as a single dwelling that can also be used as an office. A large, multifunctional central unit is used to give the sense of separate sections within the space.

The available space wraps around the central unit in a "U" shape. On one side are the kitchen and utility area, whilst on the other are the entrance hallway, bathroom entrance and bed. The bed and bathroom are contained within the unit and can therefore remain hidden from sight.

With the entrance to the bathroom being in the entrance hallway, it is naturally out of sight from most of the apartment and therefore quite discrete. The bed, however, is built into the corner of the unit and is therefore highly visible. To combat this, sliding wooden doors have been installed around the bed allowing it to be hidden during the day or when entertaining guests.

In addition to changing the use and feel of the space, the sliding doors also hide storage drawers below the bed. More shelving storage is provided around the top of the central unit, in freestanding units elsewhere in the apartment and above the kitchen units. The clearly sectioned nature of the room and its sparse furnishing allow it to be easily adapted as is required at any given time.

Tsukiji Room H was completed in September of this year.

Source: Yuichi Yoshida & Associates

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Clever unit turns Tokyo bedsit into adaptable partitioned apartment

Albany, NY (PRWEB) December 04, 2014

The report presents a detailed analysis of the market, combined with plausible insights and information about various market segments of the global budget hotels market. The report states that in the overall hotel industry, budget hotels have been observing a room occupancy rate of 70-80% in some countries.

View Full Report at http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/analysis/229295

Increasing demand for affordable yet sophisticated lodging, rising occupancy of middle-class population, and rising disposable incomes have resulted in increased demand for budget hotels in Asia-Pacific and Africa. On a global front, the fact that budget hotels are less susceptible to financial crisis compared to luxury hotels is fueling demand.

The report on budget hotels includes market data from 40 countries between the years 2009 and 2013. Through in-depth analysis of this data, the report also brings forth key performance indicators of the global budget hotels market. The report segments the budget hotels market on the basis of performance indicators such as occupancy rate, number of rooms, number of hotel establishments, room nights occupied, average room revenue per available room, room nights available, average room revenue per occupied room, total room revenues, average total revenue per available room, total non-room revenues, number of guests, and total revenues for the review period (2009-2013) and the forecast period of the report (2014-2018). Detailed assessment of regional budget hotels markets of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East is contained in the report.

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The study states that the European budget hotels market is the key geographic segment of the global market. Many leading brands operating in the budget hotels business including Ibis, Premier Inn, Motel One, easy Hotel, hotelF1, and Travelodge have a strong presence in Europe. Recent instances of economic depression hovering over a number of European countries have led to a consistent fall in consumer disposable incomes and number of out-of-town vacations. This has resulted in a significant rise in demand for economic lodging, making European budget hotels market a key revenue generator for the overall market during the review period.

Despite Europes strong hold on the market, the U.S. will continue to remain the largest segment of the global budget hotels market during the review period, with net worth totaling approximately US$12.4 billion in 2013. However, shares of the budget category of the overall hotel industry remained low in the U.S. compared to those in European countries such as France and the U.K., and Latin American countries such as Argentina, Peru, and Brazil.

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The regional budget hotels market of Asia-Pacific registered a strong growth rate during the forecast period. The report states that this regional budget hotels market is becoming increasingly standardized and the level of sophistication is becoming progressively consistent.

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Marketresearchreports.biz: Economic Slowdown in Europe Fueling the Global Budget Hotels Market

News

Primary addition housing classes

By JOE CAGLE Wednesday, December 3, 2014 7:46 AM CST

The Arab Tribune

The new addition to the Arab Primary School has been completed and is being used for music and science lab classes.

Next school year principal Dr. Leah Keith plans on using the addition for much more.

We will have six, second grade classrooms by the beginning of next school year, Keith said. There will still be some second grade classes in the original building, however.

These new classrooms have several technological aspects which, Keith said, will be useful.

Each room has a projector and (smart) board, she said. Teachers in these classrooms will also have access to their own heating and cooling units. Were trying to keep these new rooms cutting edge and basically making them an extension of what we already do.

The new classrooms also have convenient technology such as motion detectors to control the rooms lights.

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Primary addition housing classes

Iowa State University's C6 simulator can take you inside a burning house, an active shooter situation and even a fire aboard the International Space Station.

View video

The C6 is a cube-shaped room in Howe Hall on the ISU campus in Ames. Every side of the cube lights up with images and with the addition of 3D glasses people go through a realistic virtual experience.

"Remember, it's a really, really heavy thing to do to close the hatch," said Nir Keren, an ISU associate professor of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.

"Everything becomes real," said Elmer Tse, a junior in Aerospace Engineering at ISU.

"Some of the video games are getting extremely good, life like, but what they're missing is a sense of depth, a sense of just presences and that's what the C6 brings," said Peter Carlson, a C6 project 3D artist.

The C6 is lit up by 100 million pixels, images made by a highly advanced projection system. Every single side measures 10 feet and each side of the cube-shaped room adds to a viewer's 3D experience.

"This is a very sophisticated lab that creates this real life experience," said Keren.

Keren and a kinesiology professor are using the C6 to study and test how humans make decisions and respond in stressful situations.

"We measure heart rate, blood pressure," said Keren.

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Cube-shaped ISU room is like nothing you've ever seen

Mutli-Level Addition and Renovation in Potomac, MD (time lapse)
As one of the original residents of the Avenel community in Potomac, MD, the homeowners had never made any changes to their home and dreamed of a much-needed renovation. After talking with...

By: BOWAVideo

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Mutli-Level Addition and Renovation in Potomac, MD (time lapse) - Video

If you're shopping for a media-streaming box for your living room, you should include a Chromebox on your list of contenders in addition to the usual suspects (Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, et al).

A Chromebox is a small desktop computer that runs Google's Chrome operating system, and you can use one to access virtually any streaming video service available on the web. They're considerably more flexible than those sub-$100 set-top boxes, but they can't do as much as a Windows-based media PC. On the other hand, they're free from security and update hassles and they're a whole lot cheaper. You can usually find models from HP and Asuson sale for less than their $180 list prices.

Chromeboxes practically beg to have their HDMI ports connected to televisions, so I asked Asus to loan me one for testing. (The company sent a much pricier Intel Core i3 model, but the cheaper Celeron-based Chromeboxes should suffice for basic media streaming.) The Chromebox quickly became a powerful tool in my media-streaming arsenal, going places that other set-top boxes can't. But it took some work to whip it into TV-friendly shape. Here's what I did.

Setting up a Chromebox is easy if you already have a Google account and use the Chrome browser on other devices. Just plug in your username and password, and the Chromebox syncs all your bookmarks and apps automatically. You could even use another computer to assemble a list of bookmarked streaming sites.

After setup, I ran into a problem that I'd fully expected: My Sharp TV was cropping out the edges of the desktop, so I could barely see the row of icons on the bottom of the screen. A lot of TVs do this for any device you plug in, but most set-top boxes and consoles build an alignment tool into the setup process. Fortunately, Chrome OS hides a similar TV alignment tool under Settings > Device > Display settings, letting me shrink the screen down to size.

Scaling the Chromebox's resolution back to 720 was a necessary sacrifice to make icons and menu options legible.

After aligning the display, the layout still needed improvement. Looking at my 40-inch TV from about 12 feet away, all the screen elementsfrom the the icons and the address bar to the actual Web pageslookedpuny. That's because the OS is primarily designed for desktop, not living-room, use. So I went back to the settings menu to consider my options.

Chrome includes two simple ways to scale web content: You can change the size of text alone, or you can set a higher default zoom level so everything looks larger. But these settings don't affect the size of the icons in apps, bookmarks, or the address bar, all of which was too small for my liking.

The only solution was a compromise: I went into the display settings menu, and reduced the screen resolution to 720p. This increased the size of icons and the address bar, and allowed me to keep page zoom at 100 percent at the expense of video quality. I also increased font size to Very Large and enabled Show large mouse cursor in the accessibility settings.

Once everything was set up, the first thing I did was visit Hulu.com. While most set-top boxes require an $8 per month Hulu Plus subscription to watch full episodes, Hulu's desktop website includes full episodes of many recent TV shows for free. For Hulu subscribers, this alone could justify the price of a Chromebox. You could ditch your subscription and have the hardware pay for itself after a couple of years.

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How to turn a Chromebox into a video-streaming workhorse

CHRISTOPHER TRENTO/Photos

SSP Architectural Group CEO Jeanne Perantoni talks about plans for the district if the $49.8 million referendum question passes. School and municipal officials made one of their final pitches to residents at a community forum on Nov. 19, urging them to 'Vote Schools, Vote Kids' during the Dec. 9 bond referendum meeting.Fort Lee interim Superintendent Paul Saxton speaks about the school referendum. 'This, of all the plans, is not only the most creative but is financially and fiscally responsible and the

FORT LEE - With the Dec. 9 bond referendum to expand district space drawing closer, school and municipal officials made one of their final pitches to residents at a community forum on Nov. 19, urging them to "Vote Schools, Vote Kids."

The $49.8 million plan calls for a ten-room addition to School No. 2 for Pre-K and special needs students, the relocation of the district's fifth- and sixth-graders into a new 33-classroom wing at the middle school and upgrades to the high school track and field area.

CHRISTOPHER TRENTO/Photos

most efficient,' he said.

If approved, the expansions will end an overcrowding strain that has forced art, music and other classes into libraries and hallways and students at School No. 2 into trailers and provide enough space for the 400 students expected to enroll in the school system in the next five years.

The district has absorbed the addition of 350 students over the past five years with no new construction.

Mayor Mark Sokolich was also present during the Nov. 19 community forum to speak on the school referendum.

"This, of all the plans, is not only the most creative but is financially and fiscally responsible and the most efficient," said interim Superintendent Paul Saxton, noting that the reconfigured middle school will allow students to better identify with each other and create a school culture.

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Officials make final pitches for bond proposal

Tuesday, November, 25, 2014 - 1:01:33 PM

Six-room addition at St. Therese to open in September

A six-classroom addition at St. Therese of Lisieux should be completed by the time school returns next September, says the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board. A start date for the work has not been determined, the board says, but work is expected to be done by Sept. 1. The tender for the project was awarded earlier this month to DeFaveri Group, which had the lowest bid at $2.1-million. Expansion of the west Mountain elementary school was the top project on the boards wish list to the Ministry of Education in 2013. The addition will feature a number of energy efficient features such as extra insulation and sensors to turn off lightning when a room is not in use. There will also be parking lot improvements to ease congestion.

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Six-room addition at St. Therese to open in September

Instead of following the typical studio apartment floor plan and outfitting Pila's place with a galley kitchen, closet-sized bathroom, and a bedroom the size of a prison cell, PKMN developed a solution that allowed her to have several spacious roomsjust not all at once. PKMN Architecture

Instead of following the typical studio apartment floor plan and outfitting Pila's place with a galley kitchen, closet-sized bathroom, and a bedroom the size of a prison cell, PKMN developed a solution that allowed her to have several spacious roomsjust not all at once.

A series of rolling storage units double as walls.

A series of rolling storage units double as walls.

Industrial tracks, typically used to support rolling bookshelves at libraries are given new life in this atypical application. PKMN Architecture

Industrial tracks, typically used to support rolling bookshelves at libraries are given new life in this atypical application.

The itinerant nature of the walls means each of these spaces can be larger, about 160 square feet, than if they were permanently defined. PKMN Architecture

The itinerant nature of the walls means each of these spaces can be larger, about 160 square feet, than if they were permanently defined.

Special features, like a hidden Murphy Bed, are built into the boxes. PKMN Architecture

Special features, like a hidden Murphy Bed, are built into the boxes.

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Moving Walls Transform a Tiny Apartment Into a 5-Room Home

4 hours 29 minutes ago

Junior League of Lafayette teamed up with the residents of the New Life Center, a shelter for women and children in Opelousas, for their fall service project. The New Life Center operates 365 days a year and shelters up to 58 women and their children in a hotel room style setting. The Center provides three hot meals a day, a licensed Class A child care center, a substance abuse program in addition to supportive services to help secure employment, permanent housing and other services that may be needed. The provisional class combined four projects into one comprehensive approach to make a real impact on the New Life Center, thereby allowing each Junior League member a fulfilling opportunity to utilize her own unique abilities and time to truly make the most impact in the lives of the shelter's women and children.

The project included two life skills classes consisting of tips for resume writing, interview skills, appropriate work wear and budgeting. League provisional member Kelly Grenier, who helped organize the life skills class portion of the project, commented that "the class was intended to last for 30 minutes, but the residents all showed such genuine interest and care in what we had to teach them that we ended up talking for an hour and half. Some of the residents have even emailed us their resumes to review."

The second portion of the project was a clothing/toy drive in which clothing, toiletries, shoes, purses, and toys were donated by active Junior League of Lafayette members and sustainers, and sororities within the community. Items were organized and delivered to the residents of the shelter.

Repainting and organizing the shelter's recreational room was another huge portion of the project. Several members teamed up to paint and build furniture for the recreational room which serves as an area for residents to hang out as well as an overflow room when the shelter is at maximum capacity. A large mural was painted on the wall complete with handprints of all residents and Junior League provisional members.

Last but not least, children of the shelter were treated to a morning of arts and crafts during which they enjoyed making Christmas stockings and toy snowmen.

Provisional Chairman Alise Hagan stated, "This year I selected the theme We Can Do It!' as the class motto, and the provisionals have shown us that yes, they can do whatever they put their minds and hearts to. Our provisional members have first-hand experience now being 'granted the joy of filling someone's needs'. The class advisers and I are immensely proud of the creativity, dedication, and generosity of time and spirit the provisional members have demonstrated. The League continues to be inspired by each of the amazing talents the provisional members graciously share with the League, the New Life Center, and the community."

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Junior League of Lafayette Provisional Members Make an Impact