# The house of the future

*Essay by Diede Tap, 2026. Canonical version: https://diedetap.com/en/essays/house-of-the-future/*

I've been fascinated by visions of the future since I was a child. So fascinated that my parents once phoned me in sick at school so we could go to Living Tomorrow in Amsterdam.

I can't remember much about it, it was twenty-odd years ago, but a few things stuck.

You could summon a house assistant anywhere by voice, an animated woman who appeared on any of the screens built into the house. There was also a flat, portable Philips television about the size of a serving tray, so you could watch football on the toilet.

This was the future. This was how I'd be living, and this was how it would go. That somebody had assembled the future on show there, that choices had been made, and that I was looking at the output of meetings and workshops, didn't occur to me.

One of those two arrived, though not in the form they gave it. In memory that flat screen looks like a big plastic iPad, which is a neat illustration of what keeps going wrong in houses of the future: it was a television, portable, and nothing else. No app store, no network, no function beyond live TV. The shape was roughly right; what you'd eventually do with a screen like that came much later.

Much of what was on show went the same way. In hindsight a lot of it is enshittification, the printer-ink model applied to everything from chipped pizzas for your oven to a washing machine that only takes branded cartridges. But mostly everything fell just short: a device roughly resembled what it would become and missed the finesse of the real thing, or overshot it entirely. That's what makes these exhibitions fascinating. They're full of things that nearly happened. And we keep building them anyway.

## A magic pill

Go back to the nineteenth century and you find the first small vision of the future: the food pill. One capsule at breakfast and you're set for the day. When I first met the idea in the Jetsons I couldn't follow the argument. Who is this for? Eating is one of the better things in life, the point in the day where everything stops, and usually a social occasion too.

The pill was never meant for the eater. It was meant for the cook. In 1887 Anna Bowman Dodd raised it as freedom for women, "when the last pie was made into the first pellet". Not that she meant it: she had no time for feminism and wrote the whole thing as mockery.

The mockery still spelled out what that freedom involved. A woman could detach herself from her husband and from her staff alike. It was a liberation from staff as much as anything. The work still had to happen, it just stopped being visible.

What the pill promised in miniature, the house of the future promises at full scale: less work in the kitchen, framed so you never ask who's doing it instead. In the late fifties Monsanto, of Roundup and that other pesticide, Agent Orange, puts a plastic house in Disneyland. It reportedly drew close to half a million people in six weeks. The chemical company's signature was clear. Look, you can even build a house out of plastic. The daily life of a future family was wrapped around that message.

Watching the films of it back, what strikes me is that everything is tucked behind smooth surfaces. If you can't see it, it isn't there. Press a button and it appears: the dishwasher, the cupboard, the lights. The work has been done for you.

What's gone from the picture is the second person. Whoever used to help, the staff, the delivery man, the rest of the family. All of them have vanished into this American Dream.

## Rosmalen

The Netherlands followed a little later with a house of its own, courtesy of our own futurologist Chriet Titulaer. A complete house designed by Cees Dam, demonstrating how we'd be living. You talk to the kitchen and it walks you through the apple pie recipe step by step. The floor has sockets for the vacuum hose, so all the dust ends up in the garage, where somebody still has to empty it. You order groceries by reading numbers out of a catalogue to your house, and you arm the alarm with a card. Completely mad, as far as the public was concerned, and yet there's a video phone on the wall, which has been utterly ordinary for fifteen years or so.

The house held something like 250 demonstrations of the future and was seen by more than 3.5 million people. There were supposedly traffic jams on the motorway on opening day. Minister Nijpels opened it not with a ribbon but by frying a pancake on the futuristic hob.

The pancake is interesting in itself: something ordinary that renders the future in the conventions of its own moment, and that anyone can read instantly. Everything there had to be legible to a visitor from the present. What they were looking at was, to them, the future in operation.

## It's allowed to be an illusion

The pill and both houses never had to work. The food pill never got past stories, pop culture and satire. There isn't even a failed prototype, unless you count the protein drinks in the supermarket.

The Monsanto house had a flat-screen television, explained away on the grounds that the technology for it hadn't been invented. The set was there; the picture wasn't.

In Rosmalen you could open the bathroom ceiling with your voice, though it never worked properly. One of the makers says as much in an interview: "you always needed that little button as well." Beside the demonstration of the future sat a button, for when the house wouldn't listen.

The mechanism only has to look as though it works for the length of the demonstration. Free of technical reality, you can colour the future in however you like. It's precisely because the television was switched off that 1957 could show you the living room of 1985.

The people building these houses also said, without meaning to, who belonged where. A house of the future comes with a fictional family, and the make-up of that family is a statement about the roles inside it. Because it was a real place about daily life, you can't not say who's in the kitchen.

In Andere Tijden there's footage of Howard getting home from work and phoning the house: "Hob on. CD on. And run the bath." Meanwhile Marijke Toekomst is doing the shopping by computer. Her surname means Future and she's still at the stove.

This is 1989. Nothing technical required it, since the house could do whatever its makers dreamt up, and the division of labour is barely different from 1957.

People did question it at the time. An interviewer asked whether working, learning and shopping at home wouldn't leave us isolated, shut up in our own houses. Titulaer's view was that people would only grow more independent and individual, arranging their own time and work: "it just keeps getting more fun."

The idea was that residents would spend as little time as possible on obligations and have more left over for each other. Decades later one of the makers explains where that time went: "it has been amply used up by all the other pleasures being handed to you." The time did arrive. It just didn't go to each other. We had no word for doomscrolling yet.

## Overtaken

The houses never reached their own future. Every house of the future is new-build that its own era overtakes. Everything that actually changed domestic life plugged into a socket and worked just as well in a house from the thirties: the microwave, the freezer, wifi, the robot vacuum. No ducts in the floor, no hidden wall panels.

Both my memories of Living Tomorrow arrived by that route, as loose parts. The flat screen is a tablet with your provider's app on it, and might well be the only television you own. The assistant lives on your phone, or on the kitchen counter as a smart speaker. Still with a woman's voice.

The house is still standing in Rosmalen, funnel roof and all. In January 2020 it was an events venue and a skid-control course. Sales manager Collin Bell said the roof can only leak at this point, and that they use the building for storage.

What does still work is the tour. Almost every client wants to hear the story, and Bell says he's happy to tell it.