Portable housing, developing in line with the current processes of prefabricated architecture formation, is undergoing qualitative changes at the present stage. The purpose of this study is to establish conceptual approaches to the implementation of portable residential facilities.The study identifies the main socio-cultural trends affecting the formation of ways to organize portable housing:reducing living space to a minimum within one cell, searching for ways to ensure a nomadic lifestyle and the development of radical home mobility, a technological trend towards introducing elements of virtual reality in the context of organizing residential environment with the possibility of its transfer to the meta-space. Analysis of modern implemented and design concepts for organizing ultra-compact dwellings made it possible to establish the following current approaches to the formation of a portable dwelling: a capsule prefabricated object based on a solid-body structure; a portable object that has the quality of expanded functionality of its structure-forming elements; elements of clothing and equipment capable of high-quality transformation into a portable shelter; user-powered portable housing; prefabricated shelter on a movable base for operation in various extreme environmental conditions; suspended portable objects not tied to a stationary site; meta-portable residential objects implemented on the basis of virtual reality technologies. It is show that a portable home instantly absorbs changes in the social and technological sphere, becoming an experimental object for the implementation of innovative solutions.