Say you’re going to a music festival and plan to spend the night. You have a few options. You could rig up a roomy tent, but then you'll have to protect your palace from drunken Phish fans. You could sleep on Mother Earth’s very own sleeping bag, though that’s never quite as comfortable as it sounds. You even could shell out for an overpriced hotel room somewhere off site, but that sort of misses the whole point, doesn't it? There is another emerging option: Booking a pod in one of these funky honeycomb hotels.
This odd-looking structure is called a B-And-Bee. It's a prototype that’s making the rounds at Belgian music festivals. It looks like the lovechild of Japanese capsule hotel and a super luxe glamping tent. And I want to sleep in it.
B-And-Bee is the winning entry of a Belgian competition looking for ideas surrounding sustainable entrepreneurship. In Belgium, music festivals are huge. Attendees usually bring cheap tents to sleep in, and when the fun is over they’ll leave the tent to be trashed or burned. It’s an ecological nightmare, says Diana Schneider, a designer at Achilles Design who led the project along with Raf Schoors, Tim Ruytjens and social entrepreneurs at Compaan and Labeur. “We wanted to provide a sustainable sleeping option.”
Since space is limited at festivals (and in Belgium in general), the team began searching for a way to accommodate the most people with the smallest spatial footprint without sacrificing privacy and comfort. They came up with the honeycomb structure, in which pods stack on top of each other and click into place. Each pod measures 1.7 meters wide by 1.45 meters tall and has a king-sized bed that can fold up into a seat. Each also includes a light and a power source.
The hexagonal form emerged after testing many different shapes. “We were looking for the most effective way to stack cells so they strengthen each other,” Schneider says. “If you stack a square on top of each other the structure won’t strengthen itself, whereas if you stack hexagons, they fit into each other and stabilize the structure.” According to Belgian regulations, that tallest the structure can reach is four hexagons diagonally, but you can branch your party hive out as horizontally as far as you please.
Schneider and her team are still testing prototypes, but the company has plans to mass produce them this fall so they’re ready for the 2015 festival season. Look for them soon at a Burning Man near you.
