Airbnb's innovation lab Samara announces Backyard, an initiative to design and prototype new ways of building homes, starting in 2019
After launching a home-sharing revolution, Airbnb's founders started asking themselves, “What's next?” They successfully created a global network …
Context & Ripple Effects
Backyard is the second act for Samara, the in-house lab Airbnb stood up in 2016 to run experimental hospitality projects like tourist community centers in little-traveled towns. The difference this time is physical: instead of software experiments layered on existing homes, Samara now proposes designing and prototyping the homes themselves, with first test units public in 2019.
It also extends a year of supply-side experimentation at Airbnb — the company had already piloted Open Homes in San Jose, letting residents register as standby hosts for emergencies. Where Open Homes recruited new kinds of hosts into existing buildings, Backyard asks whether Airbnb should shape the buildings too.
First-order effects
- Airbnb's supply strategy gains a second track alongside host recruitment: prototype housing designed by Samara, with the 2019 test units serving as the proof point for whether the company can move into physical development.
- Samara's mandate expands from experimental hospitality services to architecture and construction, making it the internal owner of Airbnb's housing-design ambitions.
Second-order effects
- If the prototypes work, builders, prefab manufacturers, and landowners become potential suppliers to a platform that has until now only matched demand to existing stock — a new customer channel for the construction side of housing.
- Cities and regulators would face a new category to rule on: homes purpose-built for short-term rental rather than long-term residency, pressing on zoning rules written before home-sharing existed.
Third-order effects
- The longer-term pattern points at platform companies graduating from intermediating assets to producing them — the same instinct behind Airbnb's later moves to help renters list apartments and pair homeowners with professional co-hosts, each step deepening control over supply.
- Whether Backyard becomes a real product line or stays a lab experiment is genuinely unresolved in this coverage, but the direction of travel — owning more of the housing stack — is what the surrounding programs all reinforce.
The trend: Hospitality platforms are evolving from matching guests to existing homes toward shaping and eventually producing their own supply, one lab experiment and host program at a time.