House Of The Future Will Be Your Friend

When is a house more than a home?

When it’s your friend.

In the next millennium, interior environments are going to do a lot more to take care of the people under their roofs and the communities around them.

Houses of the future will be interactive, caring, sharing, protective and able to learn about occupants’ preferences. Your house will take your messages, play your favorite music, monitor your visitors, save your knees, connect you to the world, make your coffee, stock your pantry shelves and keep down the dust.

Chances are you won’t be alone: You’ll be surrounded with friends, family, maybe even a former spouse, as part of a “re-extended family.” You may live in a senior commune or a “new millennium” boarding house; you may live in a small town and do your work by computer. Or you may live in a new “subdivision” built on the former site of some post-industrial ruin in the middle of a big city.

When you’re not working out of your home office, you can relax in front of the big-screen or projection TV, with access to hundreds, maybe thousands, of channels, and a library of hundreds of movies. You can exercise in your home gym, then soothe away the aches of the day in your home spa, complete with whirlpool, massaging multijet shower and scale that keeps track of your weight and body-mass index. Or you can sit on your front porch and chat with neighbors strolling along the curved, tree-lined street.

Wherever you live and work, prepare for “a radical departure” from the present, says Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. In a recent issue, the institute’s quarterly, Trends Journal, said, “Homes will be designed for comfort, safety, convenience and maximum independence. They’ll be marketed as ‘maintenance free,’ technologically advanced, functionally efficient, easily accessible/’ramp ready’ and ‘environmentally friendly.’

“The major design feature of these staircase-free, single-level homes will be their one large, open room, encompassing kitchen, work space and entertainment areas. Only the bedroom, bathroom and closets will be separately partitioned.”

The Trends Institute also predicts that building materials will be chosen for ease of maintenance inside and out, and that their inhabitants will want appliances that are small and light, “furniture that’s ergonomically designed, and household features, both low-tech and high-tech, that make living easy without assistance.”

All that makes “the Home of the Future,” a show house built in Dallas for the National Association of Home Builders Convention, eerily on target.

The house has two stories, but it does have an open foyer/kitchen/dining/media space with movable partitions that allow flexible room arrangements. There are no steps to get into the home, and a first-floor area could be used as a separate suite. It is energy-efficient; it has a geothermal heat pump and photovoltaic shingles to provide backup electrical power. It has a satellite dish and fiber-optic cable for communication with the world.

Most of all, it has flexibility.

“Flexibility is very important,” said San Diego designer Barry Berkus, who created the house built by Centex Homes. “The house has to respond to the changing needs of the inhabitants, to the changing family unit.”

Another much-heralded trend in recent years has been the possibility of working at home, with computers, faxes and teleconferencing to those unavoidable meetings.

But some changes are expected to go beyond technology. Architect Klaus Philipsen is, in his words, “half-predicting, half-hoping” that society - or at least the part of it driven by the dominant baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 - is on the verge of “a quantum leap from quantity to quality.”

In their younger years, he said, boomers primarily were interested in amassing goods, showing off their ability to earn higher and higher compensation.

They cared about investments and commodities, and when they bought a new house, their only concern was, “How much can we sell this for?”

The result was a big market for “tract mansions,” remote subdivisions full of 4,000-squarefoot dwellings on lots of several acres.

“But when we get older, there are some other things that matter,” Philipsen said.

Boomers getting older and more frail won’t want to live in a distant suburb where they must drive long distances for necessities. They won’t want to mow a 5-acre lot. And they won’t want to be alone in a five-bedroom, five-bathroom house.

They’ll want to live in communities, Philipsen said, where amenities and necessities are readily available, where people are connected rather than isolated.

As physical needs grow more immediate, people will be more concerned with staying put rather than with moving - a trend, he said, that’s already reflected in dropping mobility rates for the nation as a whole.

It would mean, he said, “that design would start to matter.”

He sees some evidence of that in the quality and availability of food in grocery stores and specialty markets - things no one paid much attention to five years ago, such as the availability of arugula, “chipotle” peppers and shiitake mushrooms. And stores like IKEA, the design-conscious giant home furnishings chain based in Sweden, are edging out the shops purveying fake “Colonial” and “Mediterranean” styles.

Whatever houses of the next millennium look like, Philipsen predicted, “The house as a commodity has peaked out.” When you don’t have to move, you see your dwelling differently. Instead of seeing it as a commodity to be bought and sold, “You’re looking at the house much more as an expression of yourself and an extension of yourself.”