Depot Angel: Japanese company sells pre-fabricated basements (video)

About a year ago, I blogged about Yamaha’s portable room that you could set up in bigger rooms to have your well-deserved quiet time. And now another Japanese company called Tamada brings us something similar: The Depot Angel [JP] (what a name), a pre-fabricated basement that can be, again, used to enjoy some alone time, as a storage room or as anything you’d like it to be.

The main idea is to create additional space for Japanese households at relatively affordable prices. Seeing that real estate in Japan is (generally speaking) pretty expensive, it might make sense for some families in this country to get one Depot Angel and bury it under their house.

The female buyer you can see in the (Japanese) video below says her “artificial” basement is ideal for storing rice and vegetables as the room is relatively warm in winter and cool in summer. Tamada got the inspiration for the basements from those underground tanks gas stations use.

A Depot Angel that offers between 4.6 and 6.1sqm of space costs $21,000, whereas the top model (23sqm) has a price tag of $107,000. Buyers can choose between four different models, which range from 770 kg to over a ton in weight.

Here’s a video (in Japanese):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScXDtOERNAk&w=425&h=344]

Via Japan Probe