A vaulted cellar — four spaces — one place
The four spaces
Equora is not a single room with multiple uses — it is four distinct spaces, each shaped around a different way of working. Gather. Think. Make. Produce. Sometimes a project moves through all four; sometimes only one is needed.
Up to ninety guests under vaulted brick — evenings built on what people taste, hear and handle, alongside launches, board days and memorial afternoons. The room is configured around the purpose, and everyone should be a little further along afterwards: guests, producers, the house.
From 70,000 HUFa half-day; evenings and full days priced on the page
Build an evening · see prices →Four to forty-eight people, boards on three walls, and a question worth a day. Applied research that happens outside the university — and the harder end of it too: the Iterators programme, where the Danube basin’s water actually goes, decentralised systems and ISI.
From 70,000 HUFa half-day for four to forty-eight people
Price your day →A working steel table, materials at hand, the slow logic of the prototype. One object made properly: distinctive, sustainable, and built to the use you actually described — the aesthetics and the function arrive together.
From 45,000 HUFa material trial; a first prototype from 145,000 HUF
Price your first step →Laser, UV, textile, 3D and sheet metal — by hand and by machine, single pieces and small series. Minimum order: one. The machine is the easy part; what takes courage is the first file, and that is what the introduction is for.
From 1,900 HUFan hour of machine time with a pass; 9,900 HUF a month to join
Price your session →Would you rather write than choose? Tell us what you have in mind — or come and see the room first; a visit takes 20–30 minutes and costs nothing.
Our standard
Every room, every machine hour, every seat is priced here, and the calculator adds it up while you choose. Nothing waits for us to write back, and nothing depends on who is asking.
A single tasting and a year-long partnership meet the same care and the same depth. If an evening is worth holding, it is worth holding properly — there is no lesser version of it.
No manufactured scarcity, no last-chance pricing. What we do have is named and openly stated: quieter days cost less, booking early costs less, staying costs less, and people who bring something into this house are given a rate for it.
Every calculator on this site shows what a choice costs and what it costs the world, in the same box, moving together as you decide. Ask for 18 °C rather than 22 and the total falls along with the kilograms. We would rather show you the trade than claim we have already made it for you.
There is no cookie banner here because there is nothing to consent to: our statistics count visits without identifying anyone, and nothing is kept on your machine beyond what the booking itself needs. If that ever changes, you will be asked first — properly, and before anything runs.
Part two
Everything above is what you can do here. What follows is why it is built this way — where the name comes from, what we hold ourselves to, and what we are actually testing by running a cellar on Barcsay utca.
The name
Equora is a coined word, built on the Latin root aequus — balance, proportion, fairness. The “ora” resonance points to voice, space, and edge: the point where thought finds its voice, the system takes its form, and value comes into being.
For us, Equora means that technology, community, and environment come into balance. Not too much. Not too little. Just enough.
We chose this name because Equora is the language of a proportionate future. And it is an invitation rather than a claim: let us learn together how to live in the future — not brace for it, not predict it, but practise it in a room small enough to try things in.
On influence
We name openly what shaped this place. Paul Hawken's Regeneration — the halving principle behind GoHalve. Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist — the permission to build on what came before, the practice of using one's hands. Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken — the reason our quests are finishable and voluntary rather than a points scheme. Mike Oldfield's Amarok — the closing thought, below.
What we are for
That is the whole of our value — not the square metres, not the machines. The room and the equipment are what those three need in order to happen.
Every tasting has a producer who knows the thing from the inside. Every course ends with something you made. Every machine comes with the evening that teaches it. If an evening leaves nobody any further along, it was not worth the room.
Bring a question, a skill, a craft, an audience — and we will make room for it, and honour it. This is why the price list has a personal rate on it, and why teaching here earns machine time rather than a fee.
Intellectual, communal or financial — if something works because you helped, you have a share in it. Openly and on paper, because a share that is only implied is not one.
Everything here is written in English, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. What we are building is international, intercultural, interdisciplinary and interartistic — a community of people who are learning the future rather than waiting for it. English is the language in which a Hungarian cheesemaker, a Berlin researcher and a Lisbon designer can sit at the same table and be understood. Hungarian is spoken in this house every day, and the contract and the legal pages are Hungarian too — those are the ones that govern.
We are in Budapest, and for now only in Budapest — but citizens of every nation are welcome at the table. If a second house ever opens somewhere else, the website will be in English there too, the legal pages will be in the law of that place, and in the room itself we will speak English and the local language, both.
This is not a figure of speech. If you have an evening, a question, an object or a craft worth sharing, propose it — the four questions below are the whole of the application.
Propose an evening →PEC²
Personal, Environmentally friendly, Creative, Collaboration. Two of them share the letter C, which is where the square comes from. They are a filter rather than a slogan: work that fails them does not happen here, however well it pays.
Where the work happens.
A working model
What you see is one vaulted building on Barcsay utca. It is also a working model: four spaces, a rhythm of curation, and a path that runs from a question to a finished object — each tested at real scale, against real costs, in a real neighbourhood.
The intention has always been larger than one address. If the model holds — environmentally, creatively and economically — we would build it again elsewhere. As a pattern rather than a chain: the same structure, at home in any neighbourhood where people want to make things locally, gather seriously, and think before they act.
It is the logic of Living15 applied to a building — something that grows by repeating itself rather than by growing a centre.
Equora is the first. The fractal is the plan.
Endings are beginnings.
Mike Oldfield · Amarok, 1990
The people around it
Everyone here gives us help and inspiration — some of them helped this place exist, others make the things you taste and touch. All of them are named, because a share that is only implied is not one.
If you make something worth tasting, teaching or building with, we would rather work with you than buy from you. See what that looks like →