AIRBNB WITH COMMUNITY CENTER

YOSHINO CEDAR HOUSE
Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, Japan
2017

Airbnb with Go Hasegawa & Associates

Piggybacking Tactic
Share a Resource to Multiply Use

In 2016 Airbnb founded an in-house design and innovation lab called Samara. Headed by the cofounder of Airbnb—a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design—Samara was conceived with a heady mix of design vision, tech-sector solutionism, and corporate ambition stimulated by fear of decline. The idea was to build upon Airbnb’s experience as a peer-to-peer homestay platform to branch out into product design, architecture, and even urban planning. The group’s first test project was the YOSHINO CEDAR HOUSE, located in a small Japanese fishing village with an aging population and a declining economy. The aim was to rejuvenate Yoshino’s economy with Airbnb-style tourism, while simultaneously creating a shared community center for the town and preserving cultural heritage. The resulting project, designed with architect Go Hasegawa, is a hybrid community center and homestay that offers spaces for communal cooking, dining, and social gatherings on the ground floor, and private spaces for up to seven Airbnb guests on the upper level. The project is managed by a 31-member cooperative that shares both hosting duties and revenues—a percentage of which is earmarked for a community investment fund. The town, which donated the land, clearly perceived a benefit to letting Airbnb finance the construction of the community center. As Samara’s first foray into design and planning and an experimental economic model, Yoshino Cedar House was never intended to turn a profit for Airbnb. It remains to be seen whether the model will prove to be either replicable or scalable.