The world's most luxurious portapotty: Part futuristic spacecraft, part minimalist art piece, the Portal design incorporates angular geometry, 400W of Solar to power Starlink and always-on fan that eliminates odors, and a full-length mirror.
Ever since we launched Jupe, a high-tech room designed for off-grid living, the #1 and #2 question were... where you do #1 and #2.
After over a year of research and experiments, we are excited to show the world the Portal, our update on the portapotty. A bathroom should be a calm oasis for you to take care of yourself. An always-on fan makes sure things are smelling fresh, and you can enjoy expansive views from the two-way mirror and out the skylight.
Fun fact for those who are familiar with James Turrell's Skyspaces (worth a google and an eventual visit to one if you're not): the opening in the ceiling appears to be a circle from the toilet seat, though it's actually an ellipse. Track LED lighting at night highlights the contrast with the night sky. If you visit the portal at sunset as the sky color is changing, you might experience the same type of sensory trick you'd get from a Skyspace, where the sky appears to be green, purple, or brown. You can visit the portal in the pictures here at our redwoods site ~1.5 hours from SF, bookable here: https://www.jupe.com/sites/jupe-...
👋 Hi, I’m Jeff, the Chief Designer and CEO at Jupe (YCS21) and part of the team that worked on the Portal (https://portal.jupe.com). I’m especially qualified to talk trash on the subject of sanitation being that I lived in a dumpster for a year back in my early days ♻️. I’ll ‘flush out’ the problem we’re working on below.
🚽 WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
In short, portable toilets suck. Hundreds of millions of people use portable toilets every year but has a single person ever said the words, wow, I can’t wait to use the porta potties at the Burn this year. Basically, the experience is absolute sh*t, to put it nicely.
💩 Every single experience of a product in history being a horrific one? That’s a problem worth solving.
📡 We decided to focus on fixing this sh*ittiest ever UX. The Portal is not only a space you want to hang out in while you’re there (literally, we’ve had users just ‘hang’ in the space, admiring it, for 10 minutes). The Portal solves this problem with solar-powered ventilation, lighting, ample space, Starlink for posting on the pot and ultimately an out-of-this world design that Jupe is known for. I mean, we’ve got to be the first porta potty in history that made its way into Dwell Magazine =)
🎯 BIG VISION: SOLVING HOUSING
The Portal is part of a suite of products from Jupe. who aims to build out the software and infrastructure that will enable universal autonomous housing, or the ability to pop up a village anywhere on Earth, in a day. That village will include Starlink, and of course good coffee. Jupe ultimately aims to use it’s pop up villages to solve problems for the 100 million displaced refugees, natural disaster survivors, and homeless.
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