Get to know Sarah: more room to dance!

"Welcome to my place!"

Sarah opens the door to her apartment in OBOS Living Lab at Vollebekk, Oslo. It is 26 m². For almost a year it has been her home, and part of a test of how we will live in the cities of tomorrow.

Sarah is one of the residents of Bo Kompakt, the full-scale compact living test run by our partner OBOS Living Lab, the largest property developer in Norway. In addition to MASE there are technology partners Autostore and IKEA. The apartments are of 19 to 34 m², real people living in them from 2025 to the end of 2026.

Cities are getting denser. Homes are getting smaller and more expensive. So how do you build a small home that people actually love living in? This is what OBOS wants to find out, and they are testing it with real people, in real homes. Sarah is one of them.

"How do you ensure good living quality in smaller spaces? This isn't a question we can answer on our own. That's why having partners like MASE is so important to us," says Søren Secher, CEO of OBOS Living Lab.

At MASE we make interior adaptive robotics: furniture that lets a small home live like a bigger one. Bo Kompakt is where we learn from the people who live with it every day, and Sarah is one of them. Watch the film from OBOS Living Lab below.

Sarah’s verdict

Sarah's answer is clear. "It's entirely possible to live in a small apartment and still have a really good quality of life. It's about priorities, and what you personally think matters most in a home."

Room to move

For Sarah, floor space matters. "So I can do yoga, for example, or improvised dance. Especially when the bed is up and I can push the pouf to the side. I have a bit more room to move around."
The bed she means is a MASE bed. By day it rests up at the ceiling. One tap on the wall switch and it comes down for the night. In the morning it goes back up, and the bedroom is a living room again. Same square metres, two rooms.

Nice, tidy, hers

"For me, quality of living is mostly about it being a good apartment. Mostly that things look nice and tidy around me, and that I have decorations that make me happy." Pink curtains, fresh flowers, a full bookshelf. And one rule: "Choosing furniture that makes it easy to keep things tidy is the most important thing for me."
That fits what OBOS Living Lab saw after three months of Bo Kompakt: clear zones give a greater sense of space, and good storage is what makes a compact home work over time.