HOME?
How Human Living Is Evolving
For centuries, the architecture of the home has been a theatre of formality. Dining rooms kept for Christmas. “Best rooms” preserved like museum pieces. With-drawing rooms, morning rooms, studies—each with a script, each performing a single, rigid role.
But the truth of modern life is this: we no longer live in compartments. We live in constellations.
Families stretch across generations—children, parents, grandparents, and sometimes chosen family, blended families, friends who orbit like kin. Our homes have quietly evolved to keep up. The 19th-century obsession with rooms that are used once a week, or once a year, has dissolved. Today’s living environment is rooted not in etiquette, but in energy, togetherness, and real life.
From Segmented Spaces to the New Social Heart
If the old home was a warren, the new home is a clearing. Walls have fallen. Doorways have widened. Large kitchen–dining–living spaces have become the heart of the house. These multifunctional, adaptive rooms are the modern hearth—where homework is done, meals are cooked, conversations bloom, grandparents read stories, and life spirals organically throughout the day. The kitchen is no longer a service zone. It is a stage, a workshop, a creative space, and a gathering ground. Bedrooms, too, have transformed, becoming personal retreats designed for restorative sleep, calm, and wellbeing. After years of digital distraction and post-pandemic fatigue, sleep quality has become non-negotiable—a central component of healthy living rather than a luxury.And with daily eating out now firmly back in our cultural rhythm, something fascinating has happened: in parallel, we’ve rediscovered a love of cooking and dining at home. Not the formal dining of old, but the casual, sensory, communal kind—one that celebrates fresh produce, healthy living, and the joy of doing something with your hands.
New Rooms for a New Era
As the house has opened up socially, its private and experiential spaces have become richer, more intentional. We’re witnessing a subtle renaissance in the domestic landscape—a return of rooms we thought were lost, reinvented for contemporary life.
1. The Library — the intellectual sanctuary
Where the “study” once echoed with formality, the modern library is softer, more reflective. Not just a Zoom backdrop but a quiet retreat for reading, writing, thinking, and pre-dinner drinks. A room for contemplation—an artefact of curiosity. A place where stories, objects, collections, and ideas gather.
2. The Glass House — the living greenhouse
Part greenhouse, part garden room, part quiet sanctuary.
A glass house is the new status symbol of the eco-minded home: a space for growing, nurturing, gathering, and reconnecting with the natural world. It’s a vibrant extension of the house—light-filled, sensory, green, and alive. A perfect place to entertain, decompress, or show off your horticultural prowess and climate-positive commitments.
3. The Laundry Suite & Boot Room — beautifully practical
Once hidden, these functional spaces have matured into ordered, intentional domains.
The outside world is welcomed in—muddy boots, dogs, coats, prams—while washing, drying and clothing are tucked away into calm, private zones. A modern home with young families and active lifestyles now depends on these backstage spaces to keep the stage itself feeling open, grounded and serene.
4. The ‘Show Plant’ — the new shed
Forget the old timber shed with its lawnmower and half-empty compost sacks.
Today’s homeowner wants to show something else: ingenuity, innovation, and green capability.
Battery banks. Domestic plant rooms. Solar inverters. Ground-source heat pumps. Meters spinning backwards.As PassivHaus and low-carbon living move from niche to mainstream, the domestic plant room has become a place of pride—an engineering gallery where sustainability becomes visible, legible, and worth talking about.This is the new shed: part workshop, part showroom, part quiet brag.
A Home That Reflects How We Actually Live
The modern home is an ecosystem, not a set of boxes. It supports busyness and stillness. Togetherness and solitude. It adapts to childhood, ageing, work, leisure, health, and curiosity. It is human. And as our lives evolve, so too does the shape of the spaces we inhabit—from the ceremonial and seldom-used, to the functional, meaningful, and wonderfully alive. The home of today is not a monument. It is a living organism—flexible, contemporary, and deeply connected to how we want to live, eat, sleep, learn, grow, and gather. This is human design at its best: responsive, warm, intelligent, and full of possibility.