Luxury Home Mainstays May Be Gone in 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

Luxury Home Mainstays May Be Gone in 20 Years

bloomberg.com

45 pointsjseliger63 comments

I don't think dudes changing under a towel in the locker room, (which I always find hilarious anyway), is related to people wanting more private spaces at home. Open floor houses seem glorious in the photographs, but in real life are noisy/echoey and annoying to say the least.

Want to go take a nap after a long week? If your partner is home, chances are your nap will be disturbed. Especially if you work in an open floor office, you actually look forward to coming home to something where you can shut the door.

Another annoyance is food smells from the kitchen work its way all over.

Open floor plans are a more efficient use of space. They're also great for entertaining. Ever notice how everyone congregates in the kitchen.

Open floor plans aren't great for entertaining, they're just a reasonable compromise for those of us who can't afford a large home with specialized rooms.

You can't cook a meal while talking with friends if you've got specialized rooms for both activities.

If you can afford a huge house with specialized rooms for entertaining then you can afford to hire a catering service for your parties. :-)

If you forego waiters that's not nearly as expensive as people think.

I think that's part of the current trend though, and at some point just calling Postmates or UberEats from a fancy restaurant could become the norm. Who knows?!

I do know that during my parents generation, cooking in front of people was considered unclassy. People were to hang out in the living room and the move to the dining room when it was time to eat. shrug

Sure, they're great for entertaining when you don't have kids, roommates, or pets running around making loud noises at the same time.

I've been to parties in open plan houses and I've been to parties in many-small-rooms houses and I'm not convinced one is better than the other.

In any case I'm not going to prioritise the odd occasion I have parties over the more frequent occasions that I want to read a book, the wife wants to watch TV, one kid wants to run around in circles, another wants to practice the trumpet and the third just wants to hit a saucepan with a spoon. If you have multiple family members it's nice that they can get away from each other.

Also, young men being more prudish in the locker room than old men who just don't care about that stuff anymore, that's nothing new.

The other thing is that unless you are facing the ocean, walking around naked in a glass building by night isn't very private. But walls are so XX century. Walls have to be made of glass today...

LOL, I used to live in a high-rise that faced another high-rise. Both buildings had floor to ceiling glass windows, fine in the day time, but yea, always felt diligent about closing the blinds at night for the first few months. I think at some point I forgot to care, and then later felt like if someone wanted to peep in on me, they were going to see someone with a very boring life of playing video games or working.

"new amenities as centralized cooking and catering within a development". Hah. A few years back, my sister rented a place in a 1930s block of flats in London that was designed to have a central restaurant rather than individual kitchens. The restaurant was converted to more apartments due to lack of demand. I guess sooner or later, everything old really is new again.

This reads like one of those futurist pieces from the 60s that we look back at now to laugh at.

Yeah, only all the things it says are tame and they make much sense, as opposed to being some extravagant predictions about flying cars and robot assistants.

Other than that, totally like those futurist pieces from the 60s.

The part about 3d printing "to create specific housewares for a dinner party when you throw it" to minimize the need for storage seems pretty out there, but that's the only part that really stuck out to me.

What about the fact that we no longer need kitchens because we've got Uber Eats?

Food delivery has existed for a long time, and going out to eat has existed even longer, but I still want a kitchen.

>Food delivery has existed for a long time, and going out to eat has existed even longer, but I still want a kitchen.

Yes, but people increasingly cook less for decades.

Urban areas with easy access to mass transit, ridesharing, etc., usually don't have huge garages. Rurally or in the suburbs, where mass transit is less applicable, people not only store vehicles, but also things like bikes, yard equipment, tools, and other outdoor equipment/toys.

I agree with the trend in home theaters. While a few of my recent projects had traditional "movie theater" designs, the trend is moving towards a more casual setup.

The living rooms, family rooms, master bedrooms all have the same sophisticated surround sound, high quality large LED screens, etc. It's harder now to justify the space and expense of a dedicated theater. I like the idea of a VR-room. Maybe multi-directional moving floor, padded walls, wind simulation, surround sound etc... Now that would make for an interesting home talking point.

As far as kitchens go, the trend I see is this: "Showroom kitchen" with large eat-in breakfast area and family room in one. An auxiliary kitchen connected to this either thru service doors or connected by dumbwaiter in the basement. So people can hang in the kitchen, eat appetizers, open the fridge, open a bottle of wine, etc.. while the heavy cooking prep is done in the service kitchen.

The idea about an "appliance garage"... I don't know... No one is hunting around looking for some appliance they use once in a blue moon. People are always going to have counter-top coffee machines, etc, just sitting on the counters.

As far as master-suites go... The advent of the internet is making people more creative and specific about what they want. What I'm building are really that, suites, like what you would experience in a high-end hotel. Double door entrance with a small anti-foyer, a small study room/area, double door entrances to the master bath and master closets. Sometimes the baths are split into his and her, as well as the closets. The big addition I've been doing lately are adding small, concealed bar areas. Mini-fridge, sink, coffee-maker... who wouldn't want that? Wake up on the weekend, have a steam and a shower, make a cup of coffee and sit out on a private balcony before ever leaving your room.

Wow. That's gotta be rough. I have no idea how they'll manage.

While this is a niche topic, surprisingly interesting article. Talking about home design trends and which ones they expect to disappear and why.

It might be focused on luxury, but trends often filter. Open plan was originally a luxury feature (in part because construction was more expensive for open plan) and now it is everywhere. Ditto with a master bedroom.

Keep in mind that some of the trends in the article may have gone to the excessive side. Completely open or a master bedroom taking up 1/2 of the living space might fall out of style, but only at the extremes.

Luxury trends filter by design. The greats are told to do something by a client, and the lesser firms copy the greats because their clients want to live like the people that the greats design for.

Edward Bernays has a great piece on this in Crystallizing Public Opinion in the explanation of how getting high end architects to include music rooms in their designs leads lesser architects to copy them and everything they do to stay current, so when the average Joe walks into the hardware store and sees a piano (another Bernays innovation), they think of getting a musical instrument in their music room in their new house, and they think the idea is their own, except for the case that the subtle nudges to spark that idea have all been carefully planned and out in place.

Bloomberg will be gone in 20 years if they keep posting drivel like that.

I find it weird to suggest that garage will go away. Once you get used to parking your car outside of the elements, you won't want to go back.

We bought a house recently here in Scotland and we must have looked at 20 houses before choosing the one we bought - all occupied houses had garages and not one was being used to house a car - they were mostly full of random junk.

Amusingly one house that wasn't currently occupied did have a car in its garage - a rather shiny and unused looking Lamborghini.

We ended up buying a house without a garage as we really don't need to collect more junk and our cars do fine outside. Only thing I did check was that it would be feasible to install a electrical charging point so I can finally look at getting an electric car!

[Edit: As expected of a British male of a certain age I am rather looking forward to finally owning my own shed and possibly a greenhouse].

In Santa Barbara, CA, where I live, each home must have two covered parking spaces, and the city will investigate and require you to empty out your garage if it is too full to hold cars and you don't have a carport or other covered parking.

Section 28.90.100.G.1 https://www.santabarbaraca.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.as...

Out of interest, why do the parking spaces have to be covered?

Get much rainfall there? ;-)

[NB I did try reading that doc but got some nasty complaint from an IPS]

I believe the overarching goal is to prevent the neighborhoods from becoming ones where there are two cars parked visibly in every driveway. The city desires that cars are stored out of sight or attractively under a carport. I don't think they'd approve a permit for a plain ugly covered parking structure that sat over the driveway area (not compliant with setback rules at least). As such, you end up with either cars in garages, parked out of sight behind the home, or in an attractive carport adjacent to the home (which probably only allows a single car). Cars parked on the street have to be moved every 72 hours, so that's not an option either.

Not sure about Santa Barbara, but many areas at about that latitude get frequent sever storms with hail.

Modern cars don't really fit in garages that well, even my wife's Skoda Fabia won't go in our garage.

Old cars never really fit in garages that well either.

My father had both a 1954 Chevy an a 1963 for truck. In one house, built in 1918, the old car could be guided into the 1-car garage with the help of a couple people. There was just enough room to slide around the car.

Later on, they built a new house and extended the garage for the old car to fit. The truck didn't fit in either garage. The newer cars seemed to fit slightly better, though still tight.

Also in Scotland, currently in the final week of living in this house, and I've discovered a few things during my house hunting travels. News from builders is that new builds aren't built to have a 'proper' garage - they're built to have a storage garage, to the point that a modern larger variety car won't fit.

Couple that with modern cars being bigger than they were 40 years ago means that your average Wimpey home from the 70's won't have a large enough garage.

Builders also resist building out, in favour of building up in order to get more from the tranche of land.

My wife and I despise most cookie cutter new builds, but we took a tour around a new build estate for a laugh one day... postage stamp gardens, no hammerheads for turning a car, and a driveway large enough for one car. We had to use someones driveway to turn the car around... and these are 'spacious 4 and 5 bedroom homes' on offer for £400+k

Housing in the UK really is pitiful. We have some of the smallest homes in the world these days.

> Housing in the UK really is pitiful

Eh, I'm trying out London myself these days... and San Francisco makes the flats here look spacious.

And Scotland... Driveways! Gardens! Wow.

The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet.

I was amazed to see brand new build lovely houses on sale that had no broadband availability - and this was maybe 20 mins from Perth.

> The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet.

That may be asking for too many mutually exclusive interests. If you want a large house then you're going to increase the commute. If you want a lot of high tech jobs then living spaces nearby are going to be at a premium.

Och yes - nothing specific to Scotland about those trade-offs.

Availability of decent Internet bandwidth is completely unpredictable though - one house in a rural area might be 2Mbps and another house 1km away (and no closer to a town) might, in one extreme case we found, get 450Mbps and nobody could explain to me why this was the case!

I can't imagine being happy without a garage, but I find it weird that people put cars in them. Where do they keep their tablesaw?

In the basement of course :-)

Not having to clean snow/ice off in the morning is a luxury I quite appreciate.

I keep my table saw at the local makerspace, along with most of my other tools, and the tools all the other members have chosen to share. I go visit them whenever I want to work on something; in the meantime my house stays tidy. It's a great system.

I have a "two" car garage that is wide enough for one car, but not quite for two. Plent of room on the empty side for power tools, bike storage, lawn mower and the snow blower.

Perhaps things have changed since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, but back then it worked exactly the opposite way: once you get used to using your garage as a storage unit, you won't go back to parking your car indoors.

I think the 21st century trend is more that garages will shrink and in some cases disappear because "once you get used to not needing to own a car, you won't want to go back". Car ownership is growing rapidly less essential for people who live in big cities and can afford to use uber/lyft for personal mobility and delivery services instead of going out for errands.

I don't think the garage will go away, but I do think we won't store transportation in there - especially if we happen to get mass transit to everyone via self-driving cars or something like that. (Obviously fantasy, but you get the drift).

The garage is so much more than car storage, though - as many others have pointed out, it makes for a grand workshop.

I don't park my car in the garage, but my mountain bikes and tools all go there. Can't imaging not having a garage for that reason.

> Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” he continues. As gym designers are adapting, so are condo developers.

That's ... just wow. I guess I'm totally out of touch.

As a single guy, I almost never leave my bedroom. The family room with the huge screen TV is rarely used since I torrent most everything. I have a laptop for bed and an attached bathroom. Food delivered by postmates on a lazy day.

Car sharing... Interesting. So I buy a car and some random dude crashes it for me. This is the thing everybody can't wait to see.

Who has time to crash their own car these days?

Good clickbait

The article is literally about what the title says.

Luxury home features which are popular, which may disappear due to changing consumer trends. How would you title that?

Yah, the headline says 'luxury' and it really means it.

The picture of the "smaller, new style of master bedroom" depicting a huge area the size of an entire normal-sized apartment gave it away?

Yeh, that made me laugh I'd love a master bedroom that small!

When I saw ... average renter has a salary of 300K and aged 30 ... I stopped reading. These seem like alternative facts to me. While there surely exist people like this, I call BS that they are in a significant enough number to be statistically significant for real estate developers.

They are for high end luxury developers in cities like NYC though. I don't think this article is implying these are widespread trends for the "99%" market (except maybe some of the stuff about privacy).

In places like the Bay area and Manhattan, it is not atypical to see rents of 4-5K for a 3 bedroom apartment. My personal experience (n=1) indicates that many of these places are inhabited by young adults (single or childless couples) who accept roommates as the only way to survive in these expensive areas. I don't consider this type of expensive real-estate luxury (despite the price tag). If you go to the middle of the USA or the southern states, you'll find luxury apartments/houses with all the mainstays (as the article put it) - large master bedrooms, home theatres, etc. The people buying these make a lot less than 300K I can tell you that (80-100K income will get you there and the home price would be 400-500K).

I mean, there are 319 million people in the USA, so the top 1% represents over 3 million people which is easily about a million homes. That's enough to be an industry.

Only 242 million adults.

>Luxury

All that stuff is very affordable on an average developer's salary if you move to, say, Florida.

It may be somewhat lost on the San Francisco crowd who consider a "luxury home" to be one with a separate bedroom.

The article links a Miami condo project. 3,000 square feet. $3 million dollars (or apparently up to $20 million if you are feeling spendy).

Well maybe Florida outside Miami. I was looking at Florida recently though and was amazed what you can get for a million bucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com