Could This Product Approach to Building Maximize Efficiency?

Two previous Apple, Tesla, and Burberry employees believe their company’s product-like approach to home building can help solve the housing crisis. Juno launched 18 months ago, and its founders think housing should be built much like a product. With each new phone or car, there are extensive research and development, optimization, and factory precision phases prior to launch. The two founders see current home building practice as a one-off development with a specific team for one single location—and they’re not fans of that. This new approach to designing and building claims to significantly reduce time and cost.

Their intended product is a midrise rental apartment building, five to 12 stories tall, with 100 to 200 units. Designed to be fabricated mostly as components in partnering factories and assembled on site, the buildings will use environmentally sustainable mass timber for their structure and feature high ceilings and large windows for natural air and light. The company’s first project will be announced in the next few months, and they have “an active pipeline of thousands of units,” according to Jonathan Scherr, another co-founder.

They’ve already optimized the design through a full-scale mockup in a San Francisco warehouse, which shows the building blocks of an elegant and simple building that is easily scalable to different heights and sizes, and easily built from a highly tuned set of components.

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