That place you live?
It’s not the home it used to be.
Like the American family, the American domicile is changing, responding to a whole new constellation of accelerated social realities.
“Today it’s not just your home, it’s your kids’ school, your office, the incubator for your entrepreneurial ideas, the psychic origin of so many things other than family and personal life,” said Marian Salzman, co-author of the book “Next Now: Trends for the Future.”
Over the next few years, she said, homes will become “fully equipped compounds that offer both comfort and entertainment — and very little reason to leave.”
These changes have not been lost on the world of architecture, interior design, home furnishings, and product design, whose practitioners are bracing for a significant shift in how our homes will look over the next decade.
The home of the future will be more open, integrated, green and casual.
“The formal living room is an endangered species,” said Lisa Casey Weiss, a Long Island-based consultant for the International Housewares Association.
Walls will come down, formality will vanish, and “you’ll no longer have the separation between what is public and what is private,” predicted Hansy Better, an architecture professor at Rhode Island School of Design, and principal of Studio Luz Architects in Boston.
Look for more one-story homes, she said, “almost like a ranch-house typology. It’s more versatile for the elderly and better for the young professional in terms of quickness and expediency. People don’t want to go up four flights of stairs.”
Two buzzwords you’ll be hearing a lot: “connectivity” and “integration.”
Just as divisions between people of different ages, genders, and races are blurring, so too are the components of our homes. The systems we depend on every day, such as heating, security and entertainment, will be connected to one another and they’ll all be connected to the Internet.
Offices will be integrated into more homes, as more women choose to work at home while raising their kids and as the cost of commuting increases.
Media centers will be integrated into our kitchens, where appliances will be integrated into the cabinetry. The outdoors will connect to the inside.
Remember outdoor kitchens? Think outdoor living rooms adjoining the indoors, outfitted with weatherproof furniture and plasma TVs. And increasingly, Americans will be mindful of how our daily lives are connected to the environment, opting for environmentally sustainable products, from floors, to countertops, to fabrics.
The kitchen has been the center of the universe for quite a while, but that universe is going to expand.
“Don’t think anymore about separate kitchens, dining rooms, living rooms,” said Mercedes Farrando, an architect for Arclinea Boston, a contemporary Italian kitchen design firm. “The whole space will be one continuous living space.”
This is a function of the fact that Americans are eating at home more, not that they’re necessarily cooking.
“The kitchen used to be where mom was, but today it’s where multiple generations gravitate and less about cooking,” Salzman said. “I probably watched six hours of cooking the other day between ‘Rachael Ray’ and ‘Barefoot Contessa’ but I never turned my oven on. We’re doing a lot of watching of food.”
For the many time-pressed Americans who do use the kitchen to cook, they’re increasingly “utilizing meal-assembly centers or buying one item prepared and doing the rest at home,” said Casey Weiss.Thus, there are fewer formal “voila” moments when they entertain:
“You no longer come out of the kitchen with a perfect dish on a tray,” said Farrando. “People stand around and watch you cook.”
As a result, new homes will have more open floor plans, with no walls — or lower walls — between the kitchen and other rooms.
The kitchen will be integrated into the rest of the house in other ways too, said Charles Fletcher of Charles Fletcher Designs in Boston — by using the same flooring in the kitchen as in the adjoining rooms, by hiding appliances behind cabinets that relate to woodwork in other rooms.
“People will look at stainless steel appliances and say, ‘Oh, how ’90s,'” said Michelle Lamb, editor of The Trend Curve newsletter.
The kitchen also will function as a satellite media center. Cambridge architect Alex Anmahian said he’s already seeing this trend in high-end residences.
“Half the kitchens we do now have plasma TV monitors that flip down from the cabinet,” he said.
At $15,000, it may be a bit pricey, but it’s probably a harbinger of things to come. Best Buy recently introduced a “Connected Life” system that integrates all electronics in the home so they can work together — a digital entertainment center, an Xbox, wireless cameras, light switches, even the thermostat.
Expect to see more of this kind of connectivity. In fact, expect “a connected experience 24 hours a day,” Microsoft chairman Bill Gates predicted at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas.
Gates envisions consumers building home networks with PCs, music players, game consoles, and media centers. Many expensive homes are already being outfitted with control panels that let you access automated systems, such as lighting or temperature.
Down the road you may be able to control them by the Internet, or via hand-held devices like cell phones or iPods.
“There will be sensors that can tell you if your front door has been opened or closed and your kid is home,” said Bill Ablondi of Parks Associates, a technology industry consulting firm in Dallas. “There are some people — we call them early adopters — who have these already, but it will become more widespread in the next 10 years.”
There will be more — and grander — ways to entertain ourselves at home. More TV screens scattered throughout the house, for example: Those who can afford it will be able to stay connected to their football games as they move from room to room, without missing a single play. Or they can project movies against the wall of their media room.
Just as furniture manufacturers have scrambled over the last couple of years to invent consoles to accommodate huge flat-screen TVs, so will they create a category of furniture for the myriad smaller devices and gizmos in our lives.
Michigan-based Sligh Furniture is already on the case: it recently introduced a Family Communication Center that’s part desk, part storage, and part computer station. It lets you dock your computer, recharge your phones, file papers, do homework, even tack up messages and hold your keys.
Connectivity will extend to the kitchen, too. Manufacturers are finding ways to adapt computers to make them more kitchen friendly, said Ablondi.
Our kitchens may be equipped with computers that utilize voice recognition systems, for example, so people can download recipes or check ingredients while they’re cooking: No keyboard required.
But this is just the beginning, judging from some of the kitchen products introduced recently in Las Vegas. The Icebox, for example, is a sort of entertainment PC customized to the kitchen, including a keyboard that can be washed in the sink and a touch-screen monitor that can be wiped off with a sponge.
The bathroom is the place where we’ll hide from it all.
“We work hard, we play hard, so how do we relax hard? The home of the future has to offer extreme relaxation,” said trend guru and author Robyn Waters, Target’s former vice president of trend, design and product development.
For the deprived many who can’t afford a meditation or so-called “rejuvenation room” combining sauna and fancy steam showers, the bathroom will be that refuge, offering what Waters thinks of as “5-minute vacations” or “deep-breath moments.”
The trend will be for bathrooms to get bigger and more opulent, with more access to natural light, gigantic (or multiple) shower faucets, and shower stalls “big enough for a riot of bishops to take a shower at the same time,” said Cambridge architect Alex Anmahian.
Heated floors and towel racks will become more commonplace, as will luxurious towels.
The green movement will influence the bathroom too, as consumers turn to sustainable towels made of “premium cotton yarns or yarns made of natural fibers like bamboo,” said Warren Shoulberg, editor of Home Furnishings News, a weekly trade newspaper. “We see a lot of this, and now it’s filtering down to the masses.”
The bedroom is the other place we’ll hide from it all.
For an overstimulated, sleep-deprived nation, “sleep is the new sex,” said Salzman.
“Bedrooms will become less sensual and sexual and more focused on the healthful benefits of sleep,” she said. “We’ll spend more money on the place we sleep, including refrigerators in the bedrooms,” to spare ourselves the inconvenience of traipsing into the kitchen for a glass of ice water or a midnight snack.
“And we’ll sleep in that absolutely perfect bed with absolutely perfect linen,” she said, a trend becoming more universal as high thread-count sheets become more affordable.
Think soothing colors, upholstered headboards, heaps of tassel-trim pillows, silk throws, bedside candles.
Already there are signs of an emerging sub-industry devoted to products for enhancing sleep. December saw the opening of Zia, said to be the country’s first “sleep and relaxation” store, in a Minneapolis suburb.
Zia specializes in “restful products,” such as plush mattresses, aromatherapy products, herbal teas, candles, and “gentle” alarm clocks that chime softly, as though you’re waking up in an abbey or a monastery.
“I believe there is a need for this,” said store owner Jim Gabbert. “With the Internet and pressure to perform and get more done, we’re moving faster and just don’t get the kind of sleep, as a society, that we need.”
As for wall colors, predicting them is hard and getting harder, as the life cycle of colors continues to get shorter, said Lamb. But over the next couple of years, she anticipates a move away from the vivid, saturated colors of the last few years, toward quieter tones inspired by nature, such as “desert neutrals,” sandy colors, khaki and indigo.
“There is a search for relief from saturated colors,” Lamb said.
Bright colors won’t go away, but they’re likely to be used more as accents.
“This is not to say we won’t have new colors,” said Leatrice Eiseman, who heads the New Jersey-based Pantone Color Institute, which develops systems and products for color matching.
Among the color themes she is forecasting are shades inspired by fruit flavors — melon, apricot, strawberry, orange — and a palette that takes its cues from indigenous crafts and materials, such as terra cotta, mineral blue, and deep taupe.
And let us not forget green.
“Green has been very big in the last few years, and it’s not going away, because it’s a symbol of ecology and environmental presentation,” she said.
The real news in colors is not a particular shade or hue, but “the way you put them together,” Eiseman said.
She believes Americans have become emboldened by the TV decorating shows and magazines, and are more willing to be creative, and “asymmetrical” in their decorating.
“We’ve come a long way from matchy-matchy in design,” she said.
