Airbnb product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia has successfully launched a home-sharing revolution, but the company has started asking themselves, “What’s next?” According to Fast Company’s Mark Wilson, Airbnb wants to not only provide housing, but wants to provide the physical houses. As a result, Samara, a division at Airbnb, has announced a new initiative called Backyard, which aims to research and prototype ways to improve how homes are developed.
The name “Backyard” might imply that Airbnb just wants to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), those small cottages that sit behind large suburban houses and are often rented on Airbnb. Gebbia clarifies that is not the case. “The project was born in a studio near Airbnb headquarters,” he says in an interview over email. “We always felt as if we were in Airbnb’s backyard–physically and conceptually–and started referring to the project as such.”
Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia’s telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in.
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