The Smart Home of the Future

Flash forward 50 years: The “millennial generation” is reaching retirement age (which is now 78, thanks to ever-increasing life expectancy). That’s right, they are the mature members of society, no doubt complaining about the slacker youth of the day and living in a technologically advanced world we can only imagine. As we begin coverage of the HGTV Smart Home 2014 construction project, let’s take a look at how our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will live.

Let’s start with the big picture: What neighborhoods will look like. “Over the past 50 years, the biggest trend has been out of compact urban dwellings into sprawling suburban ones,” says Roger Platt, senior vice president at the US Green Building Council. “Over the next 50, the opposite is likely going to happen.” People will want a walkable lifestyle with an urban cool vibe. That means parks, bodegas and entertainment venues nearby and — thanks to population growth — extremely compact houses with multifunction rooms; for example, a single space might triple as living room, dining room and kitchen.

Rising water levels and massive coastal storms may change our methods of building along the shore, says architect Maureen Guttman of the Alliance to Save Energy. Instead of buttressing homes on ever higher, deeper and beefier pilings in the sand, she envisions houses being built on floating barges that can simply be relocated out of harm’s way when hurricanes or nor’easters approach.

Forget 2x4s and wallboard, the house of the future may be built of a material that’s something like concrete but could be manufactured on site using a giant 3D computer printer, says physicist Max Sherman, who leads the Energy Performance in Buildings Group at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. He predicts that this substance will be able to literally change itself from a super-insulating and draft-blocking barrier one minute into a breathable and free-flowing one the next, all depending on the conditions inside and outside.