I remember, with precise and affectionate detail, driving across Denmark as a child to my aunt’s house. Those journeys were less about the itinerant geography and more about arrival: the moment when the car turned into her street and the house — a modest, carefully composed interior — came into view. My father and aunt would resume a conversation that had spanned decades; their voices braided with the hush of curtains and the smell of carefully made food. As a child I did not know the provenance of the furniture, the names of artists, nor the histories folded into photographs on the wall. What registered was the totality of the experience: light softened by linen, cushions as light as clouds looked, as they were filled with delicate down, the reassuring solidity of a table that had borne innumerable meals and conversations. My aunt’s home felt, in every sense, like a container of life: carefully decorated yet used, curated enough to tell stories, and lived-in enough to shelter ordinary, unremarkable human needs.

That tension — between curated display and quotidian use — recurs when I visit artists’ studios, open-air museums or vernacular homes in Denmark and abroad. Even when a place is no longer inhabited it can still speak: the way objects relate to the room, how thresholds mediate inside and outside, the texture of walls and floors that remember hands. These are tactile, sensory connections that resist the flattening logic of the two-dimensional image. They teach us that a home is not merely a receptacle but an ecology of feeling, work, and memory; it stages rituals as modest as morning coffee and as durable as the passing on of decorated tools.

Danish architect and author Kjeld Vindum writes that: ‘… The architecture is an expression of a relationship with nature. One must be able to perceive, understand, and sense space, and think in terms of space in order to develop and work with it, and one must understand that space is formed by matter, by materials, and is thereby intertwined with nature.'¹

The home as a container of life
A home can be perceived as a container — the material and moral response to how we shelter ourselves, how societies organise and reorganise, where culture, climate, and technology compel us to re-envision intimacy, labour, and memory. But a home is so much more; it holds a sense of belonging to us as well. British writer and publisher Leonard Woolf put it into words, describing his and Virginia Woolf’s home Monk’s House: ‘...it is the house one lives in that has the greatest and most lasting influence on oneself and the way one lives. It is the house that day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute determines the quality, colour, atmosphere, and pace of one’s life; it constitutes the structure of what one engages in, what one can do, and in one’s relationships with other people.’²

To consider the future of domestic life we must search for connections in the vernacular ingenuity of cave and courtyard dwellings, through the inward-focused oikos— the mostly private quarters of a household, of ancient Greece — across the pragmatic experiments of post-war social housing, and into the present moment in which interiors are both lived spaces and broadcasted tableaux.

From these experiences emerge values that, properly interpreted, can guide what we can define as the domestic development or process ahead: privacy and porousness; functional clarity; repairability and multisensory tactility; and the capacity to hold both solitude and social engagements. The future home inhabitant that takes these traditions seriously will also respond to certain pressing realities: decreasing environmental footprints, climate volatility, and a moral imperative to live with less waste and more mutual care.

What do we come from?
Historically, a home’s primary function was explicit and elemental: shelter from weather, predators, and hostile neighbours. Dug-in cave dwellings and earth-integrated houses reveal how our ancestors sought thermal stability and quiet: interior niches became both seating and storage, thick walls held warmth and the marks of repair alike.

The classical oikos in Greece articulates another lesson. It was an inward-facing domestic universe — a courtyard around which life was organised. The oikos was socially stratified and gendered, its walls demarcating spaces of labour, nurture, and seclusion. The Greek household taught architects a choreography of life in which sheltered interiority and controlled openness could coexist; the courtyard facilitated public and private and allowed domestic ritual to unfold in a microclimate of intimacy. The transition being an important part of our interior, not necessarily marked by closing doors, but a step or low-ceilinged opening indicating a change of purpose, use, and atmosphere.

Domestic life of the 20th century was dramatically reframed by the Modernist project. Architects and planners, driven by new industrial capacities and an aspiration for social reform, advanced a doctrine of clarity: rooms with prescribed functions, hygienic kitchens, efficient circulation. In the post-war northern European context — Denmark offers a noticeable example — housing became a public commitment. Policy and design converged to raise standards across broad populations: dwellings were designed to support family routines, to allow places for private retreat, and to recognise domestic labour spatially. Modernism’s achievements were indisputable in terms of sanitation, ventilation, and scale; yet the very pursuit of programmatic clarity reduced the layered tactility of earlier homes. Thin walls, standardised surfaces, and an aversion to visible repair could render interiors hygienic but emotionally thin.

The pendulum of domestic life has swung back and forth many times: between inward sanctuary and public display, between strict functional order and layered tactility. Today the swing has taken on a new shape. Digital life and recent social ruptures — most visible during the pandemic lockdowns — have collapsed spheres that were once separate: kitchens doubled as classrooms, living rooms as offices. At the same time, social media invites us to stage our interiors as serialised, photographic narratives. Homes have become both habitats and profiles — places for real domestic practice and curated showcases for audiences and algorithms. This is not merely an aesthetic dilemma. Historically, rulers once blurred private rooms by receiving guests in intensely personal settings when being dressed; today that blurring happens online. The real design challenge, then, is to make room for spectacle without emptying out sanctuary, continuously creating a sense of belonging.

What we come from
From ancestral and modern lessons, a set of core values emerges as a meaningful foundation for a future domestic aesthetic and practice. We can learn from the past and reimagine how we would like to live. The Danish architecture studio gruppe-aja did exactly this when creating a pathway for House 14a, which was created in close collaboration with the owner and pihlmann architects.³ The studio carefully sourced concrete tiles in close vicinity of the house and created a pathway which occurs as though it has always been part of the garden; yet it is refreshingly new, breaking the tiles into smaller parts from their industrial measurements. A tactile pathway that will grow a closer connection with its setting, as moss finds its way. The influence of Pikionis’ paths, made of collected marble from demolished buildings in Athens leading from the city of Athens to the Acropolis, is subtle and respectfully carried out.⁴

We must surround ourselves with spaces, objects, and interiors which can be maintained, repaired, and altered. The throwaway culture of mass consumption undermines the lifespans of both objects and buildings. Repairability is an architectural and cultural ethic: furniture designed with visible fasteners and replaceable parts; appliances built to be serviced; building components that are visible, legible, and mendable. Such choices reduce waste, create local economies of repair, and restore the dignity of craft. Makerspaces, local workshop facilities, and shared spare-part libraries are institutional complements to this ethic. Inspiration is found in Open Air Museums’ interiors. Here historic approaches to materials and details are displayed as they were originally used.

Designing for all the senses
Homes are felt as much as they are seen. All our senses must be pleased, creating multisensory tactility through textures, patina, soundscapes, and scents that can anchor memory profoundly. The sheen on a patched wooden countertop or the scuff on an old windowsill is an archive of use; it tells a story that a staged photograph cannot. Design must reincorporate tactile materials: plaster that shows small repairs, wood that ages with touch, textiles that soften with wear.

The Danish designer Sara Martinsen’s exhibition Rooted Potential (2024) displayed this, when creating a pavilion inside the exhibition space. The pavilion is created from locally sourced materials and can be used in larger spaces to create transitions and smaller contemplative spaces.

Privacy does not mean isolation; porousness means channels for neighbourly trust — shared laundry rooms, communal gardens, and tool libraries — that multiply the capacities of small private units. A humane home protects the rhythms of daily life while enabling a connectedness toward surrounding neighbours and community. Courtyards, transitions, and semi-public thresholds are among architectural strategies that transplant social life onto private terrain.

Modernism and its legacy
Modernism’s insistence on purposefulness remains vital: kitchens must support the making of nutritious food; rooms must be laid out with attention to a flexible life to both labour and rest. But functional clarity must be subtle, accommodating improvisation. A kitchen should be efficient for cooking and generous for communal life; a workspace should be convertible into a bedroom and vice versa.

Urban density requires ingenuity: kitchens that economise labour through shared facilities, flexible rooms that morph between living, sleeping, and working, and communal infrastructures that reduce per-capita material burdens. Policy again matters; post-war interventions teach us that standards and public investment can lift whole populations. Contemporary planners should prioritise public goods —ones that make compactness humane and emphasise communities. Communities today reflect the historic village; a group of individuals who share knowledge and tools.

The exterior of a home; roof shapes, orientation, shading, and thermal mass are not quaint relics but practical tools. We can re-learn when researching regional vernacular architecture. A house that uses deep eaves, internally oriented courtyards, or earth-integration gains passive comfort without resource-intensive technology. Blending vernacular passive strategies with modern, repairable appliances yields resilient performance and keeps the aesthetic grounded in place. The aesthetics are here described as what can be felt with all senses — a holistic experience of a space.

The described values must be put into practice, which requires interventions at multiple scales: material, architectural, communal, and civic. The urgent need for collaboration and research is unquestionable; we need to share knowledge, we need to debate, ask questions, and be curious about other fields than our own and potential innovative solutions.

Designing for transience and resilience
In a world where every product can be rendered digitally in seconds it is of great importance to emphasise the significance of tactility and purpose. As we spend countless hours behind our screens our other senses are left with no or very little excitement. This can be levelled with a meticulous attention to details and materiality; design choices can accentuate this with the usage of durable, local materials and visible craft. Joinery that can be disassembled, finishes that accept repair, and furnishings that can be reconfigured to extend lifespans and invite participation in care. Furniture becomes a common instrument when it is built to be repaired, lent, and reworked. Again, there is great inspiration to be found in historic spaces with holistic aesthetics in Open Air Museums and alike. A contemporary example is to be found in AtMa’s wonderful project J39.5, on the transformation of Danish Modern designer Børge Mogensen’s dining chair J39. The partly damaged chairs were disassembled and reassembled into new designs, showcasing an innovative approach to adaptive reuse in design.

Architecturally, a home should be conceived as collections of interconnected spaces rather than a sequence of monofunctional rooms. A communal living area might be bounded by adjacent alcoves — lighted niches for reading, bench-work areas for mending — while the plan must preserve deliberately contemplative spaces. From there, transitions to communal spaces, the block and neighbourhood, are extensions of the home. A future with shared infrastructures — laundries, communal kitchens, tool libraries, and makerspaces — can create a more inviting atmosphere for inhabitants.

Civic policy must scaffold these practices with public investment in community experiments, and educational programmes for domestic skills will rebuild civic competence. Micro-courses in plumbing basics, garment repair, appliance diagnostics, and composting can be taught within apartment buildings or neighbourhood hubs as public services, treating household competence as a public good rather than a private hobby. When we as children learn how to sew on a button or fix a lamp in a communal workshop, we inherit a practice of stewardship, of temporal care that stands in opposition to disposability.

Ethics of the everyday
To take part in our local communities is ethical. The Vitruvian triad — firmitas, utilitas, venustas⁵— retains salience if we read it ethically: durability that is social as well as structural; utility that respects joy, labour, and care; beauty that acknowledges time and use rather than erasing it. Beauty, here, is aesthetically tactile and ethical: the sheen of a patched countertop, the warmth of textiles that have been handled, the visual honesty of a wall that honestly show repairs and wiring.

There are tensions and trade-offs. Dense urban living requires shared infrastructure, which demands governance and trust. Repair economies require training and investment. Openness to sharing invites vulnerability that not all residents will welcome. Yet historical precedents — post-war social housing strategies in Scandinavia, the evolution of the oikos, vernacular practices — show that policy, design, and culture can converge to produce dignified everyday life at scale. The agenda is pragmatic and plural: it proposes multiple forms of domesticity rather than a single prescriptive model.

We should design for transience. Climate displacement, economic precarity, and changing life courses will make mobility more common. Homes that can be disassembled, retrofitted, and relocated without total demolition preserve both material value and social continuity. Modular home sets — core shelter units adaptable with different claddings and courtyard attachments — allow cultural specificity while enabling mobility. Shared neighbourhood infrastructure reduces duplication and incentivises communal custodianship.

Continuity as a future practice
The home of the future depends on the connectedness between cultural practices and architecture. Rituals of maintenance, the social legitimacy of mending, and the practice of keeping memorabilia all require narratives and institutions that sustain them.

In the quiet of my aunt’s living room, an unstated curriculum was at work: how to gather, how to host, how to live among things with respect. That domestic education is ordinary but powerful. It is the reason a handmade ceramic bowl can mean more than a perfect, mass-produced replacement; it is why the smell of sunlight on an old rug can anchor a person across decades. The future home should be capable of hosting such ordinary, dignified continuities even as it accommodates new modes of display and sociality. Architects and designers must identify needs, and research and learn from history as well as from other skilled people to create homes where we will have a sense of belonging.

To imagine homes that are humane and climate-wise is to commit to a plural aesthetic: the sanctuary; the Modernist’s imagination of public housing; the tactile knowledge of craft and museums; and the selective performativity of contemporary digital life. Concretely, it means building durable shells, supporting repair economies, and designing flexible spaces.

If designers, architects, policymakers, and citizens take these lessons seriously, the home will remain the place where we seek shelter, contemplate, and gather — while participating in the larger life of society and the planet. It will be a pendulum that reflects a society capable of balancing spectacle with sanctity, novelty with continuity, and individual comfort with collective care. And in that balance, the home will remain a humane practice and a durable form, worthy of being both lived in and preserved for those who come after us.