No matter how you feel about those crowd-sourced, spec-based design outlets that have sprung up en masse over the last few years, one in particular has just gotten a big boost. Late last week, 99designs announced that it has received $35 million in funding from Accel Partners, the venture capital firm responsible for helping companies like Facebook, Etsy and Groupon grow and take over the world. The basic model for the business is that a company submits a brief, designers create samples based off that brief of logos or websites or whatever needs designing, and then the company picks a winner. Where the criticism lives is that sites like these devalue the design profession, as there are often hundreds of designers vying for small paychecks (some of the site’s examples show, for instance, that 1335 designs were submitted for a logo project that paid out just $605 in total). The “submit and see if you win” also toes the line between essentially working for free and the standard RFP, something that doesn’t always sit well with the no-spec crowd. We ourselves have specifically singled out 99designs over the years, from discussing their partnership with SXSW in 2009 and best-selling evangelist author Rick Warren using the site to crowdsource his latest book cover. But like them or not, this $35 million investment shows they’re here to stay. What’s more, according to Techcrunch, 99designs had been actively pushing away capital groups before signing on with Accel, so profitable had they been even without them.

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This house in Tokyo by Japanese practice Torafu Architects creates built-in furniture through the overlapping of interior spaces.

House in Ookayama is constructed on a narrow plot and has an entrance halfway along the elevation to maximise the size of the rooms, which are all accessed via a central staircase.

A storage space is inserted between the first and second floors and the floor of the living room also extends into the bedroom as a desk.

Photographs are by Daici Ano.

More by Torafu Architects on Dezeen »

More Japanese Houses on Dezeen »

The following is from the architect:

House in Ookayama by Torafu Architects:

A Collection of Large Furniture
Two generations live in this three-storied wooden house located in a Tokyo residential area.

The site corresponds to a 4.7 m wide × 16.5 m long fringe of the land where the owner’s parents lived.

Furthermore, the site is enclosed by buildings on three sides while its northern side abuts directly on the street.

The layout was designed to alleviate the impression of narrowness of the frontage in as much as possible and make the best use of the site’s conditions within the maximum volume allowed by setback restrictions.

To minimize pressure from the corridor on the frontage path we devised a basic plan that placed the entrance and stairs at the center while the bedroom and public areas are divided on a north-south axis.

Taking into account the fact that the occupants had many belongings, we incorporated a storage space shaped like a box between the 1st and 2nd floors.

Above the bedroom on the 2nd floor is a child’s room that resembles a huge table.

Each part is connected by stairs bearing a different design and the space between some of the steps can be used for storage as well.

The floor of the living room on the 2nd floor extends into the bedroom where it serves as a desk.

The toilet in the intermediary storage space protrudes into the 2nd floor to act as a light-well and a table.

The bay window in the wall connecting to the ceiling can also become a bench, giving a sense of loftiness to the whole space. Boards placed between the four sturdy walls passing through the 1st to 3rd floor become shelves and desks that make for a big storage wall by using the structure of the house.

This random-looking composition resembles multifunctional stacking,thus can be seen as one large piece of furniture.

We implemented a cross-section design free from the hierarchical configuration of a normal building, blurring the boundaries between building and furniture.

From the fitting of the terrace to the placement of the shelves and other minute details, we employed a construction method by aggregation, whereby each architectural component becomes a piece of furniture.

This makes the house a vessel that allows for perpetual change to take place and leaves enough leeway for its inhabitants to add their own touch after they move in.

See also:

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SN.House by atelierA5	House in Kohgo by Yutaka Yoshida & Assoc.	Y House by TOFU

The notorious no-show David Carson has done it again. Despite being the winner of nearly 200 top design awards, designer of the infamous RayGun magazine, and a client list that would make any designer drool, it’s no secret that when you hire or ask the famous Carson to come speak, there’s a good chance he just might never show up. You might recall our reporting from when he did this back in 2007, when he agreed to appear on Debbie Millman‘s “Design Matters” show only to never show up, which landed him some sharp (and funny) criticism from both Millman and the internet at large. Now in New Zealand recently, Carson was hired to come speak to two groups in the cities of Wellington and Auckland, where attendees would be paying $300 apiece for the opportunity to hear him speak. He was to be flown business class, put up in likely very nice hotels, and paid $10,000 per appearance. Only trick, of course, is that he never showed up and now the event’s organizer, Gary Hewlett, is out $35,000. Hewlett has promised that he has “lawyer in the US who are ready to act” in getting the money refunded from Carson. Here’s a bit:

Mr Carson postponed in February, then again in March, claiming he had lost his passport. However, Mr Hewlett doesn’t believe him.

“He was judging a set of awards in northern Spain over the weekend he was supposed to be in New Zealand,” Mr Hewlett says. “So how that happened I don’t know.”

For further reading, to get a sense of how regular a thing this seems to be for Carson, we recommend scanning the comments on this story about his New Zealand no-show from 3 News. A dozen notes about no-shows across the world and even an alleged drunken appearance at one lecture that he did decide to show up for.

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Urbio is an urban vertical garden whose business is also going vertical thanks to Kickstarter. Urban gardens are pretty hot right now and Urbio has got to be the best solution we’ve seen yet.