A Masterpiece of Obsolescence
The smell of freshly sanded white oak always reminds me of a funeral, which is probably the first sign that my perspective on residential architecture is slightly skewed. I am standing in a kitchen that cost $177,777, staring at a custom-built breakfast nook that was designed, with painstaking precision, to accommodate a family of four during the exact 37-month window when the children were small enough to fit on the bench but not yet old enough to resent being touched by their siblings. It is a masterpiece of obsolescence. The youngest is now 17, has legs like a gazelle, and refuses to sit in the ‘nook’ because it feels like a high chair for giants. We spend our lives trying to nail down the wind, and we call it interior design.
I’ve spent the morning thinking about the concept of ‘forever’ while I watched a neighbor attempt to parallel park a massive SUV into a spot that was clearly intended for a Vespa. I watched him nail it on the first try-a rare, silent victory of spatial awareness that felt like a good omen for this essay. But even that perfect park is temporary. In 47 minutes, he will drive away. The spot will be empty. The achievement will dissolve into the asphalt. Yet, when we build houses, we act as if we are the final version of ourselves. We treat our current preferences like historical mandates, forgetting that the version of me who wanted a built-in humidor 7 years ago is now a man who can’t stand the smell of tobacco and instead needs a place to store 47 different types of artisanal hot sauce.
The Architectural Shift: The ‘Next’ Over the ‘Now’
There is a specific kind of wisdom required to build for a person who doesn’t exist yet, a philosophy championed where the focus shifts from the ‘now’ to the ‘next’. It’s about building in the capacity for change rather than the permanence of a specific moment.
The Escape Room Mindset
My friend Ivan N.S. understands this better than most. Ivan is an escape room designer by trade, a man who literally spends his professional life creating traps that people pay to get out of. He once told me, over 7 cups of overly bitter espresso, that the biggest mistake people make in his rooms is the same mistake they make in their homes: they assume the current state of the room is the only state it can ever exist in. Ivan’s own house is a chaotic testament to this. He treats his living space like a stage set, which is irritating when you’re looking for a bathroom that was a pantry the week before, but it’s psychologically honest.
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We are obsessed with the ‘forever home’ because we are terrified of the ‘temporary self.’ If we can just build the perfect kitchen… maybe we can stop the clock.
The house remains a rigid skeleton of a life we no longer lead. I’ve seen it a hundred times in the wealthy suburbs around Boston. Massive, custom-built estates with ‘hobby rooms’ that are now just glorified storage lockers for elliptical machines that haven’t been plugged in since 2017.
Used 7 Times
Bookcases
– The Hidden Cost of Over-Customization –
Psychological Friction and Imagination Failure
This is the hidden cost of over-customization. It’s not just the money; it’s the psychological friction. When you build a house so specifically for your current life, you are essentially telling your future self that there is no room for growth. You are locking the door from the inside. We see this in the trend of ‘aging in place’ renovations that are done 27 years too early. People install grab bars and widen doorways when they are still running marathons, creating a home that feels like a hospital wing before they’ve even had their first grey hair. It’s a failure of imagination.
The Breakthrough: Break the Furniture
The players who got out the fastest were the ones who didn’t try to organize the room, but the ones who were willing to break the furniture to make a path. We must be willing to break the imposed structure of our past decisions.
This philosophy is championed by a firm focused on LLC, where the focus shifts from the ‘now’ to the ‘next’. Most people see a renovation as a destination. But the moment a room is ‘done,’ it starts to die. It becomes a museum of your past desires.
Agile Architecture and Rodent Wisdom
I’ve started advising people to look for ‘agile’ architecture. Instead of the $47,000 built-in library, buy 7 beautiful, freestanding bookcases. Instead of the dedicated theater room with tiered seating, create a flex space with a projector. The goal is to minimize the amount of ‘ego’ we bake into the floor plan.
Actually, I digress for a moment-I saw a squirrel today that had managed to wedge a whole slice of pizza into a birdhouse. It was a 7-inch crust, perfectly balanced. The squirrel didn’t care that the birdhouse wasn’t ‘designed’ for pizza storage. It adapted. It saw an opportunity and took it. Why are we less adaptable than rodents with pizza?
Adaptability is the only true luxury.
We get so hung up on the ‘intended use’ of a room that we suffer through a cramped home office because it was originally labeled a ‘breakfast nook’ on the blueprints.
Building for the Next Self
A house should be more like a suit that can be tailored, and less like a suit of armor. I’ve seen people spend $77,000 on ‘smart home’ technology that was obsolete before the 17th of the month, all because they wanted to feel like they were living in the future. But the future isn’t a touch-screen panel on your wall. The future is the fact that you might want to turn your garage into an art studio in 7 years, or your guest room into a nursery, or your nursery into a gym.
The Temporary Palace
Ivan N.S.’s latest escape room is built entirely out of cardboard and zip ties. It costs almost nothing to change, and yet it feels more ‘real’ than the marble-clad kitchens I see in the magazines. It acknowledges the truth: we are passing through.
If we stop building for ‘forever,’ we might actually start living for ‘now.’ We can stop stressing about whether the $47-per-square-foot tile will still be in style in 2047 and just pick the thing that makes us happy today. We can stop building traps for our future selves.
We might find that we aren’t actually trapped by our houses, but by our insistence that we will always be the people who bought them.
The mortar is still wet, if you’re brave enough to move the bricks.
