Disney is bringing back an attraction from the fifties to their theme park, the house of the future. Hewlett Packard and GE among others will be teaming up with the imagineers to project their vision. Live actors will be acting out how lives will be lived. I have an odd connection to the original house. One of the projected household goods of the original was an electric toothbrush. My father was one of the inventors of that bit of Americana.
My father was always a bit of a futurist. He had convinced the builders of the World Trade Centers to use a gaseous laser to incinerate the waste in the edifices. The problem was that there were no gaseous lasers at the time. He made a working model, and there is a home in Chicago area with (probably by now plastered over) holes from laser burns. He would not test it outside, so the kitchen table was his place of choice to my mother's anger. I loved watching the tests, to see if the thing was going to blow up. In the tradition of my father, I wanted to posit my own ideas for this new house.
The home will be pre-fabricated in a manufacturing facility, and it will use modular components. It will be built on a smaller piece of land, but to accommodate the need for square footage, the home will be three to four stories tall. Wood will be used sparingly as plastics become more important. Natural materials like wood and stone will be used more for accents. The homes will return to the live/work concept of the past. Most of these workers will be office workers, since firms will be looking to save space and utilities. Energy efficiency will obviously be more important, but this will involve finding ways of keeping our current home equipment while using less energy. Graywater and rainwater systems will be in all homes, and hot water systems will be of the recirculating type. Walls will be easily movable to change room functions over the life of the home. Rooms will be more like individual apartments. The home would be wireless and paperless. Public parks will take on a new significance.
Easy predications to make. I do wonder why real estate professionals are not being asked for input. Realtors see the trends that the consumers are desiring, while we inspectors see the issues with equipment. Other RE professionals bring their own perspectives to this topic too. What do you see as the house of the future?
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