More making homes into havens
It used to be enough for your home to be your castle. Now it needs to be a sanctuary, too.
The cocooning trend of the 1980s has evolved into a new stage of nest-building. People are bringing home the social and entertainment aspects of life they used to go out for, from building entertainment rooms designed for crowds to restaurant-quality kitchens and baths with four-star spa amenities.
Trend forecaster Faith Popcorn, who coined “cocooning” two decades ago, says that behavior has metamorphosed into something more.
Sanctuary involves “finding a safe place,” Popcorn says. “I think as the threats get larger, the need for a safe place gets stronger. We are feeling extremely vulnerable and threatened by orange alerts and things like the fact we can’t eat fish more than once a week.”
Entertainment and solace
Control is a key component of the sanctuary trend. High-speed Internet connections give us the news when we want it. TiVo and DVD let us watch the shows and movies we want without the irritations of $10 popcorn and rude fellow moviegoers.
Away from home, people are seeking sanctuary during their commutes. Apple iPods shut out the noise of the outside world. In cars, vehicle guidance systems keep us from getting lost, and satellite radio services let us listen to what we want on the way. We want life on our terms as much as we can.
Jennifer Roebuck, 25, of Daytona Beach, Fla., and her husband created a media room in their new home, an idea “born both by not wanting to go out as much and creating a sanctuary.”
With a flat-screen TV, DVD player, surround-sound speakers and a Sony PlayStation 2, the room “makes for fantastic movie nights with our friends,” she says.
Likewise, the room serves as a place of solace when they want to go unplugged.
To increase his peace of mind at home, Paul Wesselmann, 37, a leadership trainer from Madison, Wis., is turning his home into a spa. He has two water fountains, soft lights, calming aromas that are infused via a disc player and New Age music that plays on his XM Satellite radio system.
A primal urge
Experts are divided about the development of sanctuary as a trend. To Popcorn, sanctuary is a subset of cocooning. “Cocooning is finding sanctuary, and it is continuing. We’re seeing the moving cocoon, with iPods and Blackberries that create a sense of a cocoon. It’s almost primal.”
Other observers see sanctuary as a concept that is playing out on a commercial and global level. Just as workers face a 24/7 workplace, businesses and countries must constantly protect themselves from invasions, whether by computer viruses or terrorists.
“We are living in a world where the new dangers are not a superpower. They are the inability to secure personal and companies’ borders. From that comes the attempts to create sanctuary,” says Charles Hess, president of Inferential Focus Inc., a research and consulting firm in New York.
Parents see home entertainment as a sanctuary that keeps their kids safe. “As the (three) kids get older and are looking for a place to hang, we would prefer it to be at home where we can keep an eye on them,” says Jim Murphy, 44, of Auburn, N.Y. He is adding a game room with TV, DVD, foosball, PlayStation 2 and board games.
But even couples without children are staying in. When Jeff and Tanya Engel bought a new home in the Dallas area last year, they made sure it had a room that they could convert into a home theater with a projector, big screen and plushy seats. They did not stop there. The Engels outfitted their family room with an arcade-quality air hockey table, a pingpong table and a 60-inch TV for playing Xbox and PlayStation 2 video games.