Houses are getting smaller and smaller and the world's largest furniture manufacturer is looking for alternatives. Ikea has launched a project to convert its furniture into robots to adapt to the space automatically. An innovation that comes to the market under the name of 'Rognan' and which has been developed by Ori Systems, the company headed by a 31-year-old entrepreneur born in San Sebastian and who studied engineering at the University of Barcelona. Tecnun.  

This new Ikea partner is Alumni Tecnun Hasier Larrea. "The concept of robotic furniture comes onto the market so that a micro-flat can have a bedroom, a room with a living room, an office or a dressing room," explains the CEO of Ori Systems. A collaboration with the Swedish furniture giant has been secretly in the making for two years and has come to light at Ikea's home in Älmhult (Sweden) with Democratic Design Day 2019.

This entrepreneur from San Sebastian saw an opportunity in the lack of development in the real estate industry. "While in any factory we find robots and new advances, in the real estate sector we continue to build homes like in Roman times with conventional living rooms and bedrooms", he explains. His ideas started with beds that automatically lowered from the ceiling or prototypes of sofas that moved around the house.

A research that has allowed him to reach Ikea's shop windows. The first version of Rognan is controlled by a button placed in the house that allows the wardrobes to be moved to create a dressing room and the bed to be taken out to rest. Larrea explains that in the United States they are already working on voice-operated models that can be controlled by mobile phone.

His idea, although it has the San Sebastian seal, was born and developed in Boston (United States). Larrea decided in 2011 to cross the pond to complement his industrial engineering degree at Tecnun -University of Navarra with a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would start this project.

And, at just 31 years of age, Larrea is leading one of the main innovations of a company with a turnover of more than 37 billion euros a year. "In the US market we supply real estate developers with products that are somewhat more sophisticated, but this collaboration with Ikea allows us to have access to an infrastructure that reaches all over the world," concludes the engineer from Tecnun.