The storage lockers in Zaha Hadid’s 520 West 28th Street are controlled by robots!

For most New Yorkers, visiting your storage unit means picking through cobwebs and groping around for your belongings under creepy flickering florescent lights.

Residents at Zaha Hadid Architect’s new building at 520 West 28th Street will be spared that experience. The storage units in the high profile building, located right off the High Line, were modeled after the security deposit viewing rooms in a Swiss Bank. And they are fancy AF.

“The automated storage system at 520 West 28th is one of the most elegant, private and secure home storage systems invented,” Greg Gushee, an executive vice president at Related Companies, which is developing the building, tells LLNYC.

So what makes this storage unit so special? Well for one thing, the entire operation is controlled by robots. Residents never have to dig around in their own units. They simply have to waltz into the building’s viewing room and, voilà! There, they can call for their storage vault (which can be customized with shelves, or millwork) and robots will bring them to the room. When they’re done, the robot will take the vault away and put it back into the storage area. Related wouldn’t describe these robots exactly, which leaves us free to imagine they look and sound like C3PO.

When you are done playing around with whatever you’re storing in your vault, the robot will take it away from the viewing room, and bring it to a garage “where no humans are allowed.” If the system does detect a human being wandering around, the whole thing will shut down.

Though Related declined to say how much extra these storage units will cost residents, the penthouse in the building is currently asking $50 million, so we imagine they won’t be cheap. Residents must insure all of their own items.

Even though these units may look like a Swiss Bank security deposit viewing room, it’s important to remember they are nowhere near as secure. So rather than storing your ill-gotten millions in the vault, Gushee recommends using them to keep “typical resident storage items” like your skis.

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