Why aren’t houses more fun?
We design our houses for sleeping, eating, washing and sitting (toilets and sofas). That’s about it. Oh, a bit of laundry.
Is this really the best we can do with human existence?
Think about the houses you remember from childhood. Other people’s houses mostly. Your grandmother’s. Your friend’s. The cupboard under the stairs became a den in the afternoons. The attic with the dormer window that looked out over the back gardens of the whole street. The bit behind the sofa where you could hide during Dr Who. The airing cupboard that smelt of clean sheets.
Those bits were incidents. They existed because the house was made from brick and timber and had to be what it was, and the cupboard under the stairs was a by-product of getting the stairs up. The dormer was there because someone wanted a bedroom in the roof. The bit behind the sofa was there because the sofa was pushed out to face the telly. They were accidents. Brilliant ones. And we remember them forty years later. The parts of the house we were supposed to use — the dining room, the front room kept for best — have faded completely.
Now compare that to the brief for a home.
Four bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Open plan kitchen-dining-living. Utility room. Downstairs loo. Study or snug. Garage.
Distilled to a list of rooms named after what you do in them. Sleep. Bathe. Cook. Eat. Sit. Work. Store cars. It’s like we’ve defaulted to what’s easiest for estate agents. Every square metre accounted for, assigned a function, and that function is almost always a chore or a state of rest.
Where’s the room for doing things? For making a mess? For reading a book in a proper chair with the right light? For sitting in a patch of sun that you noticed one February afternoon and wanted to sit in again? For music? For a model railway that takes up more space than it should? For drying coats by a fire?
We’ve outsourced all of that. We go out to find fun. Restaurants. Pubs. Cinemas. Cafes. Even libraries are where people go to concentrate properly. The house has become the dormitory between the bits of the day where something happens.
I think the problem starts with the naming. Bedroom. Bathroom. Living room. Dining room. The words came from a time when that’s all they did. The names froze. The rooms followed. Now we brief and build in those names and wonder why the result feels like boxes within a box with a garden.
What if the brief started with verbs we actually like? Dancing. Eating together. Reading in the bath. Watching the rain. Drawing. Looking at something that took a long time to grow. Listening to a record all the way through. Having people around and not knowing where they’ve gone.
Less space, probably. Just different words at the start.
Or no words at all.
The rooms would follow.
This Week’s Links:
A new all-in-one gym. It’ll save you ten years of gym membership….
Pininfarina rethink smartphones with supercar design principles. I saw the title of this article and thought they might have come up with an interesting take on a smartphone. Not really. They’ve changed the shape of the camera housing. Brilliant.
The robots are coming. They could have given it a nice butler-style Savile Row suit instead of wrapping it in a potato sack. But I guess you could dress it up yourself. $499 a month. Quite good value if it can do all the chores.
Main Image credit: We’ve become very good at listing rooms by function, and strangely bad at creating homes people enjoy. (ChatGPT)
