Home Futures In-Depth

Home ownership has become the preserve of the few, while phone ownership has become almost entirely universal. The phone became ubiquitous in British homes during the 1970s. Heavy, cumbersome and firmly tethered by a cable, the telephone sat stately and static in hallways and living rooms...

Television’s arrival in the 1940s transformed our homes for the next three quarters of a century. Not only did it monopolise the way in which millions spent their leisure time, it also configured our living rooms in a highly prescribed manner: a centrally positioned TV ‘set’ with a sofa facing it...

The earliest evidence of human-controlled fire dates back more than half a million years. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province might be ‘the site of the world’s oldest barbecue’. Besides cooking, fire also provided warmth and protection...

The inventor of the light switch, John Henry Holmes, was a Quaker, and thus a believer in the ability of each person to access ‘the light within’. The light switch, of course, enables each person to access the light without, and has been doing so, solidly, since 1884...

Today, bathroom design is aimed at opulence and ease. In a world of heated mirrors (to avoid fogging) and heated floors (to avoid chilly feet) the shower curtain is persona non-grata. It is a negotiated compromise: it turns a bathtub into a cumbersome and sometimes treacherous shower cubicle...

Rising house prices and rapidly growing urban populations have forced many people in cities to reduce their living space – a steady retreat from single occupancy, home ownership and private gardens to the fat-share, the bedroom, and, ultimately, the bed...

The man apron is now officially a ‘thing’. Fashioned out of hardwearing fabric such as canvas or jean, the man apron is as much a badge of hipster culture and the creative classes as coffee or a beard...

‘A home is not a house’, claimed design critic and architectural historian Reyner Banham in 1965. Instead, he proposed we could dwell in an ‘un-house’ – a transparent bubble inflated by an air-conditioning outlet and centred around a technological core...

Priapus was the god of gardens and fertility. Statues of him have been found in private villas and in the houses of Pompeii and ancient Rome. As such this demigod is considered the forefather of the ornamental hermit or garden gnome...

Explore today’s home through the prism of yesterday’s imagination. Are we living in the way that pioneering architects and designers throughout the 20th century predicted, or has our idea of home proved resistant to real change?

Alongside original essays by leading voices in the field, this richly illustrated book features more than 200 colour images, organised in six thematic sections exploring privacy, the smart home, compact living, self-sufficiency, nomadic lifestyles and the idea of the home as an idyllic landscape.