May/June 2006: 7th Anniversary Spectacular

Stow-n-Go for Everyone!

American cars are the best in the world. Well, maybe not cars - mini-vans. Our mini-vans are super-awesome. Beleaguered and mocked, the soccer-mom car is sold year after year for one simple reason - it fulfills a need. It's not sexy, and it's certainly not fast, but I think car makers use the dang things to unveil the best futuristic technology to the world. Wall-to-wall airbags, tee-vees on every seat, and stow-n-go seating. The last is the best invention ever. I love it, and while I'd never buy a car because it had stow-n-go, I will forever devise plans to install it into every home in which I live.

Mine is not an original idea. Chrysler rolls a commercial with some man folding a couch in his living room into the floor to make room for a kiddie party. While I believe the stow-n-go living room is awesome, no one should stop there. Every room in the house should be stow-n-go. (My wife thinks such constriction is confining or something to burst my bubble, but I told her to shut up.) Here's how every room should be outfitted with the stow-n-go (at least how I wanna do it.)

The Bedroom
The Murphy Bed is an olde-tyme version of stow-n-go, but the entire bedroom should be rocking that way. That feature stays. Why do you need a bed during the day, anyway? You should use it for sleeping, fooling around, or folding clothes. Nothing more. Get that bed in the wall, already!

If you are not lucky enough to have a walk-in closet, the chest of drawers should be built into the walls. A chest of drawers are dumb, and a pain in the ass to move, what with the free-moving drawers needing to be emptied before loading onto the van. It's a big old waste of time waiting to happen.

With all your new-found floor space, you now have a sitting room. In the floor below the bed should, a set of stow-n-go cushioned chairs unfold, and between them arises a table with a drawer full of monogrammed coasters. You and your favorite mate can now enjoy the sunrise out of your bay window, two cold-ones, and the morning paper.

Of course, all day is not the morning. Sometimes you are just getting home from work. Hidden in the wall behind stow-n-go framed paintings are the hooks and storage bin for a hammock. As soon as you are home from work, take off your shoes, plop your trousers on the floor, and hop onto the hammock for some quality pre-dinner (or post happy-hour) relaxation.

(Note: Every room in the house needs stow-n-go hammocks. The kitchen and the bathroom, too. Where don't you need a hammock?)

The Bathroom
At first, I thought the only stow-n-go feature for this room should be the obligatory hammocks. Everything in the bathroom is attached to fixed pipes, right? I think a bathroom need two stow-n-go features badly: one, a couch; and two, a stand-up urinal.

I'll tackle the second feature first. A urinal is absolutely critical to the versatility of a bathroom. However, it should be slightly hidden from view. To that end, I believe a flexible curtain should be recessed into the wall, and whipped around to cover the tall marble beast when it is not in use. On the outside should be a mosaic or painting of Quick-Draw McGraw.

The bathroom couch is less conceptual and ridiculous. People should be able to party in a bathroom. No, not just get BJ's from coked up grad students at wine and gin parties - an awesome bathroom should be the haven for brave men and women who don't mind others taking a whiz in their presence. However, most people would not feel comfortable standing in the bathroom having some drinks and flavored cigarettes. People need a couch. The couch is carefully stow-n-go'd in the ceiling above the bathtub. When the party begins, pull the lever to lower the cushions and make one hella charming sitting area. I envision it as a wide chaise lounge.

Kitchen and Dining Room
It should go without saying that every piece of furniture should stow-n-go into the floor. Out of the bottom of the dining room wall will roll a large carpet (you know, one that hold the room together.) In the opposite wall, below the two hammock hooks, one should find bins full of bean bags. After dinner, guests should grab a bean-bag, a pudding snack, and site around the room, generally facing the west-facing wall. The final stow-n-go feature for the dining room is that wall - with the pull of a lever the wall descends into the foundation, opening the room to the world. Once the wall is out of the way, guests can mingle in the dining room and deck at the same time. Sliding doors are for suckers.

(Stow-n-go science requires at least one in every four walls descend into the floor.)

The kitchen itself should be left virtually untouched, other than installing a hammock or two. When you have perfected the fish-taco, I'll let you turn the kitchen in to something special.

Godzilla tells me that Germans are building homes and apartments with plenty of stow-n-go features, those residences are all terrible small. While I applaud their effrorts of applying RV technology to housing, I don't believe that stow-n-go's future lies in a tiny urban setting. Stow-n-go is the future for all suburban development. When people are no longer content with their six bedroom house on 3 acres of developed farm land, they don't need to move into a larger place. They can trick it out with some hot stow-n-go features. With stow-n-go, you get to have at least two homes in one. Pure suburban bliss.