Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are going
to do something a little bit, well, a little
bit different. A little closer to home, you might
say. Literally. Yeah, usually we're looking at,
you know, these big abstract concepts or tech
trends, but today we're zooming in on something
so physical, so omnipresent, that I think most
of us have just stopped actually seeing it. Right.
It's the background radiation of modern life.
It is. It's arguably the most common back of
the American dream. It's the set for, what, 90
% of the sitcoms you grew up watching? Oh, at
least. And there's a statistically very high
probability that you were sitting inside one
of these things right now while you listen to
this. Yeah. We're talking about the single family
detached home. The ubiquitous box. I know on
the surface that sounds, well, a little mundane,
doesn't it? It's just a house. It's four walls,
a roof. Maybe a driveway. Yeah, what's there
to talk about for an hour? But when you actually
dig into the source material we have today, which
is this really fascinating stack covering sociology,
architectural history, linguistics, and a frankly
exhausting catalog of room types. It just reveals
a much more complex story. It really does. I
went into this thinking, you know, we were just
going to talk about drywall, maybe some property
taxes, mortgage rates. But this is really a history
of privacy, isn't it? It's not about construction.
It's about psychology. It is. It's about a fundamental
shift in how humans organize themselves socially.
It's about how we decided, as a species, to stop
living on top of each other and start building
these little moats of air around our families.
So our mission today is to look past the curb
appeal. We want to understand why we live this
way. And why the terminology, the words we use,
create such massive confusion if you try to talk
about real estate across the Atlantic. Oh, the
U .S. versus U .K. thing is a minefield. Right.
And also what the future holds for this specific
structure, because as we're going to see, the
single family detached home isn't just a pile
of bricks. It's a statement. It's a statement
that says, I am separate. I mean, you take the
high level view. For the vast majority of human
history, living in a detached box with just your
immediate biological family was... Weird. It
was an anomaly. It wasn't the default setting.
Not at all. We moved from communal survival,
living in clans, tribes, multi -generational
clusters, to this intense, almost obsessive focus
on individual privacy. And what's fascinating
now is that we're at a point in the 21st century
where that whole shift is being challenged again.
It feels like a full circle moment. But before
we get to the future, we have to look at the
source stack we've got. It's pretty comprehensive.
We've got a breakdown of definitions. The legal
stuff, the zoning stuff. Yeah. Then the regional
terminologies, specifically that U .S. versus
U .K. and Commonwealth divide you mentioned.
And a historical evolution that takes us from
like pre -industrial times right up to the post
-World War II boom. And we also have an architectural
breakdown. We're going to look at everything
from a humble cottage all the way up to a palace.
And we have this list of rooms that is honestly...
mind -boggling. That list is my favorite part.
I'm not kidding. There are rooms in there I didn't
even know had names and some that I have definitely
decided I need to add to my dream house. I think
I know which ones you mean. But before we get
lost in the blueprints, I want to tease something
that just jumped out at me immediately. There
is a term in the sources for a specific type
of house design that sounds absolutely ridiculous.
It's called the snout house. The Snout House,
yes. It sounds funny, almost like a cartoon character's
house, but it describes a very real and often
criticized phenomenon in modern suburban design.
It's a perfect example of how our priorities
have shifted over the last, what, 50 or 60 years.
I can't wait to unpack that. And on your end,
you found some stuff about why living with your
in -laws used to be basically the only way to
survive. That's right. We tend to think of the
nuclear family, mom, dad, kids, as the traditional
family, right? But historically speaking, that's
not it. Living with your parents and your spouse's
parents was the default setting for centuries.
The fact that we stopped doing that is actually
the strange part of the timeline. Okay, let's
dive in. Let's start with the basics. Section
one, defining the box. What actually is a single
family detached home? Because I feel like I know
it when I see it, but the legal definitions are
surprisingly rigid. They are. So if we look at
the technical definition that's in our material,
specifically citing folks like Statistics Canada
and general zoning usage, it's a freestanding
residential building. But there are these two
key criteria that make it single family. And
detached. Right. So single family seems obvious.
But let's just clarify. It means it's occupied
by one household. Correct. So it excludes hotels,
rooming houses, boarding houses, or anything
designed for transit accommodation. It's for
a family or, you know, a single household unit
to inhabit terminally. But there's a little wiggle
room there, isn't there? There is. And it depends
on where you live. Some jurisdictions will allow
for a basement suite or what they call an accessory
dwelling unit. You know, like a granny flat over
the garage. Ah, carriage house. Exactly. And
that doesn't necessarily strip the house of its
single family label. Yeah. But broadly, the design
intent is for one unit to control the entire
structure. Okay. And then we have the detached
part. This seems like the critical distinction.
This is where your mode of error comes in. This
is the deal breaker. To be detached, you cannot
share walls. Period. You must be completely separated
by open space on all four sides from any other
structure. So if you're touching the neighbor's
house. Even just by a garage wall or maybe a
shared roofline. Then you are not in a detached
home. You might be in a semi -detached, a duplex,
a townhouse, or a terrace house. But detached
implies that you can walk all the way around
your property without bumping into another building.
And that distinction is vital because it implies
something else, right? It implies land. That's
a great point. The source notes that most single
-family homes are built on lots that are larger
than the structure itself. You aren't just buying
the building. You are buying the empty space
around it. Which creates the yard in North American
English. Or the garden in British English. And
that open space is just as much a part of the
definition as the walls are. It's a buffer zone.
It's a way of ensuring that your noise doesn't
bleed into your neighbor's life. And their cooking
smells don't bleed into yours. Exactly. It's
architectural social distancing. It's so interesting
because that buffer zone is really inefficient.
If you think about it purely from like a resource
perspective. We are heating four exposed walls
instead of sharing two with a neighbor and saving
energy. Oh, massively inefficient. But culturally,
we place a huge premium on that inefficiency.
We pay extra for the air gap. We do. We pay for
the autonomy. When you share a wall, you share
a fate, to some degree. You know? If your neighbor
has a leak, you might get a leak. If their kid
takes up the drums. You're listening to drum
solos. You're listening to the drums. The Detached
Home is the architectural version of Mind Your
Own Business. Okay, so speaking of the structure
sitting on the lot, we have to talk about the
snout house. This term is hilarious to me, but
the definition when you visualize it is actually
kind of sad. It is a derogatory term. It's used
by architects and urban planners. A snout house
is a specific layout where the attached garage
creates this protruding snout. So the garage
is the nose of the house. Essentially. The definition
is a house where the attached front entry garage
sits closer to the street than the living quarters
or the front door. So imagine walking down the
street. You look at a house. What is the first
thing you see? What's the dominant architectural
feature? In a snout house, it's the garage door,
a big blank garage door. Exactly. It's the door
for the car, not the door for the humans. The
human entrance is usually set back. Maybe it's
in shadow or off to the side. An afterthought.
It's like the house is saying the car lives here
and the people are just guests of the car. It
really emphasizes how the automobile shaped the
single family home, particularly in North America
post 1950s. I mean, before the car became dominant,
homes had front porches. The face of the house
was designed to interact with the street, with
pedestrians, with neighbors walking by. It was
social. It was. As the car became the primary
mode of transit, the garage became the primary
entrance, both usually and functionally. That's
such a good point. If you drive into your garage,
close the door behind you with a remote and walk
straight into your kitchen or your mudroom, you
never actually interact with the outside world.
You don't. And the snout house is the physical
manifestation of that isolation. It dominates
the lot in many ways. The Snout House is the
ultimate expression of mid -century suburban
design priorities. Privacy and mobility over,
say, curb appeal or social connection. It turns
the neighborhood into a storage facility for
vehicles rather than a community for people.
That's what the critics would say, yes. It's
a fascinating evolution. We went from big front
porches where you'd sit and talk to neighbors
to big garage doors that just shut the world
out. Now, this brings us to a bit of a language
barrier, because while we're throwing around
the term single family home, if we were recording
this in London or Manchester, people might be
looking at us funny. They absolutely would. The
source explicitly states that the term single
family home is almost unknown in the United Kingdom,
except maybe through Internet exposure to U .S.
media. Really? So if I walk into a real estate
office in London and say, hi, I'd like to see
your available single family homes. Do they just
stare at me blankly? They might be confused for
a sec. They'd figure it out. Of course, people
live in houses there, too. But the terminology
and the mental classification are completely
different. In the U .S., the real estate market
classifies housing into single family, multifamily,
condo and so on. It classifies based on the occupant
unit. OK, so it's about who lives there and in
the U .K. In the U .K., the primary mental division
is simply between houses. And flats. Flats being
apartments. Right. So in the UK, if you live
in a structure that goes from the ground to the
roof, you live in a house. It doesn't matter
if it's attached to neighbors on both sides or
not. A row home, what they call a terraced house,
is a house. A semi -detached is a house. So house
is the big category. Exactly. Within that house
category, they then specify detached, semi -detached,
or terraced. But they wouldn't say, I'm looking
to buy a single family home. They'd say, I'm
looking for a detached house. That's a subtle
but really important difference. The U .S. term
emphasizes the family, the social unit inside.
Right. But the UK term emphasizes the structure,
the brick and mortar separation. That's a really
astute observation. Yeah. And I think it speaks
to how rare detached housing can be in denser
European countries compared to the U .S. or Canada.
In America, the single -family home is the default
mental image of a house. If you ask a child to
draw a house, they draw a box with a triangle
roof standing all by itself in a yard. With a
sun in the corner. With a sun in the corner.
In the UK, a child drawing a house could very
likely draw one that's connected to another house.
The sources also list some other global variations
that I found interesting. Canada seems to be
a bridge between the two, which is usually the
case with Canada. Canada's interesting because
it uses both. You'll hear single -family home.
in casual conversation but the official census
term and you see this in legal and real estate
documents is single detached dwelling so it's
very precise very it combines the american focus
on the single unit with the british focus on
the detached structure it leaves no room for
error. And what about New Zealand? The source
mentioned something there too. Separate house.
Separate house. I like that. It's so literal.
I am separate from you. It cuts right to the
chase, doesn't it? No ambiguity there. It reflects
that colonial history of land abundance again,
the cultural expectation of separation. Okay,
so we've defined the box and we know what to
call it depending on where we are. But how did
we get here? You mentioned earlier that this
wasn't always the norm. Let's go back in time.
Section three, from the village to the suburb.
Right. To understand the single -family home,
you really have to understand what it replaced.
In pre -industrial societies, and we're talking
about most of human history here, right up until
Just a couple of hundred years ago, most people
lived in multifamily dwellings. So were they
like apartment buildings or? Not necessarily
vertical apartments like we had today. Think
more of shared compounds or longhouses or cottages
that were just packed with multiple generations
of the same family. The source describes a very
specific life cycle that was the norm for centuries.
A child lived with their parents from birth until
marriage. OK, that sounds normal enough so far.
But then. When they got married, they didn't
go out and, you know, get a mortgage on a starter
home. They generally moved in with the parents
of the husband. That's called a petrilocal system.
Or, less commonly, the parents of the wife, a
matrilocal system. Wait, so you get married and
you immediately move in with your in -laws? Yes.
Right. And you stay there. You raise your kids
there. You likely die there. The house is a continuous
entity. Wow. I mean... I love my in -laws. They're
great people. But the idea of never having your
own space, that sounds absolutely exhausting
to the modern ear. What was the logic behind
it? It was all about survival and efficiency.
The source outlines the logic perfectly. First,
the grandparents were there to help raise the
young children. You have built in free child
care. That makes a lot of sense. Then the middle
generation. the ones in their prime working years,
could care for their own aging parents. It was
this perfect closed loop of care, the young care
for the old and the old care for the very young.
Right. There was no Social Security, no nursing
homes, no daycares. The house was the social
safety net. Exactly. And then there are the practicalities.
Building a house is hard work. It takes a huge
amount of resources and labor. Why build two
when you can just add a room to one? Sure. And
think about heating. In colder climates, heating
is a massive resource drain. If you have to chop
wood by hand to survive the winter, one central
fire heating 12 people is far more efficient
than three separate fires heating four people
each. So the idea of the nuclear family living
alone, isolated in their own little box, that's
the historical outlier. It is the great historical
outlier. It's a relatively recent invention,
and it's tied directly to rising living standards,
particularly in North America and the New World.
The New World shift. Exactly. When settlers came
to North America, the math just completely changed.
Land was, for them, effectively limitless. In
Europe, you had these close -knit villages because
land was scarce and you needed to be near the
fields you worked. In the New World... Settlement
patterns often involved large farms that were
separated from neighbors by miles of wilderness.
So isolation was baked into the geography from
the start. Right. And the source suggests this
produced a really deep -seated cultural preference
for privacy in space. If you grew up in a homestead
where your nearest neighbor was a mile away,
the idea of sharing a wall with someone in a
crowded city feels... Well, it feels claustrophobic.
It feels like a downgrade. But then we had the
Industrial Revolution, right? I mean, didn't
that push everyone back together into cities?
It did, initially. Industrialization and urbanization
forced people into multi -story apartment blocks
near the factories. We saw massive densification.
Think of the tenements in New York or London
in the 1800s. Horrible conditions everyone packed
in. So it was a step back, in a way. In many
ways. But, and here is the big twist, in the
New World. That trend of densification eventually
halted and then dramatically reversed. When did
that happen? Post -World War II. The baby boom,
of course. The boom. And two specific technologies
drove it, according to our text. The automobile
and cheaper building and heating costs. The car
allowed you to leave the city for work, and cheap
energy meant you could finally afford to heat
a whole stand -alone box all by yourself. Precisely.
This combination led to mass suburbanization.
We built millions and millions of single -family
detached homes because, for the first time in
history, the average family could afford to break
that multi -generational pact. We could afford
privacy. And we outsourced all the functions
of the multigenerational home. We did. We outsourced
child care to schools and daycares. We outsourced
elder care to nursing homes. And we bought the
box. It's interesting to look at the stats on
this because it's not evenly distributed, even
within a single country. The source mentions
a Canadian example from the 2006 census that
really illustrates the difference between an
old city and a new sprawl city. It's a stark
contrast. In Montreal, which is an older, denser,
more European -style city in its layout. Lots
of walk -ups, right? Exactly. Lots of duplexes
and triplexes. In Montreal, only 7 .5 % of the
population living within the city limits lived
in single detached homes. 7 .5%. That's tiny.
It is. Most people are in attached housing of
some kind. Now, compare that to Calgary. which
is a much newer city built largely in the age
of the automobile, a classic sprawling North
American city. Okay, what's the number there?
57 .8%. Whoa, so nearly 60 % versus less than
8. That's a massive difference. It shows that
the single -family home isn't just a preference.
It's a direct result of when and how a city was
built. If the city grew up before the call was
king, it's dense. If it grew up after the car,
it's detached. And culturally, this became tied
to the American dream. The source explicitly
links the image of the house with the white picket
fence in the yard to this ideal. It became the
ultimate symbol of success. If you made it, you
got the detached box. You got your piece of land.
But not all boxes are created equal, are they?
This brings us to section four, the architecture
of status. The source lists a whole hierarchy
of house types, and honestly, the definitions
are a lot messier than I expected. They are.
Language is tricky, and it changes from place
to place. Let's start at the smaller scale, the
cottage. Now, when I hear cottage, I think of
a vacation home. You know, a cottage on the lake.
Or maybe cheese. In the U .S., the definition
provided is actually quite specific. It typically
refers to a house with four main rooms, two on
either side of a central corridor. Ah, very symmetrical.
Very. And commonly, there's a lean -to added
to the back for the kitchen and laundry. It's
a humble, functional design. Classic Americana.
But if you go to Australia? The nuance shifts.
In Australia, a cottage almost always implies
a veranda across the front. It's all about that
outdoor living space. It's a response to the
heat. And in the UK, what's a cottage there?
In the UK and Ireland, cottage is almost entirely
about age and location. It refers to any small,
old, specifically pre -World War I house in a
rural or formerly rural location. The floor plan
doesn't matter. If it's old, small, and in the
country, it's a cottage. So a new build in the
countryside, even if it's small, is not a cottage.
Not a cottage. It's just a small house. Okay,
let's move to the one that confuses me the most.
The bungalow. Oh, the bungalow. This is a classic
cross -Atlantic point of confusion. In the U
.S., a bungalow is. What exactly? In American
English, the source describes it as a medium
to large freestanding house, usually on a generous
block in the suburbs. It has a less formal floor
plan than, say, a Victorian villa. It doesn't
necessarily dictate the number of stories, though
they're often low slung, maybe one and a half
stories. Think Urson Craft style. Right. But
in the UK. In British English, bungalow has a
very, very strict definition. It is a single
story house, period. If it has a second floor,
it is not a bungalow. No stairs. No stairs to
a second floor. And because land is so precious
in the UK, single -story houses are actually
quite rare and often sought after, especially
by retirees. So a bungalow there is a very specific,
somewhat unusual thing. That's wild. I've definitely
heard Americans refer to two -story houses as
bungalows if they have that specific architectural
style. Exactly. The style defines it here. The
height defines it there. Total disconnect. All
right, let's scale up. Let's get fancy. The villa.
Villa is a term with serious pedigree. It originates
from Roman times, where it referred to a large
country retreat for the wealthy. Like a vacation
home for a senator. Precisely. Moving up to the
Victorian era, a villa was a status signal. The
source says it meant a house that was larger
than the average bylaw terraced house. It often
had a double street frontage. It was a way of
saying, I have money, and I don't live in a row
house like the common folk. And then we hit the
top of the food chain, the mansion. The mansion.
The definition here isn't just big. It's about
exceptional wealth, multiple stories, grand proportions.
But the key differentiator mentioned in the source
is really interesting. Staff. Staff. Yes. A true
mansion is defined by being too large to be maintained
by the owner alone. It implies the presence of
servant quarters. You don't just live there.
You manage a team there. That makes a lot of
sense. If you have 20 rooms, you're not vacuuming
them yourself. Or dusting the chandeliers. And
speaking of rooms, the source... lists some specific
specialty rooms found in mansions that really
paint a picture of how the other half lives oh
i saw this list it's fantastic it lists library
conservatory theater greenhouse infinity pool
bowling alley don't forget the last one and a
server room tell me my tracks too it's such a
modern jarring addition to that list you have
the bowling alley which feels very like mid -century
gilded age rich and then the server room which
is very 21st century tech billionaire rich. It
shows how the definition of luxury evolves, doesn't
it? It used to be about having a special room
to grow exotic plants, the conservatory. Now
it's about having a climate controlled room to
house your digital infrastructure. And just to
round out the top tier above the mansion, we
have the palace and the castle. Which are pretty
straightforward. Palaces are official residences
for rulers or heads of state. And castles are
defined by fortification, either real medieval
ones or, you know, architectural imitations of
them. Okay, I want to open the door and go inside.
Section 5. Inside the walls. The source material
provides an exhaustive list of rooms and spaces.
And when I say exhaustive, I mean they listed
everything from attic to wiring closet. It's
a tour of human domesticity over the centuries.
It's fascinating. I want to highlight some of
the weirder or more interesting ones. Let's start
with gender, because the list actually categorizes
some spaces in a way that suggests a long history
of separating men and women within the home.
It does. Under the category of living room variants,
it lists the man cave. Which we all know. The
basement sanctuary with the leather couch and
the neon beer sign. The modern male retreat.
But if you look at the historical counterparts
listed right next to it, it gets really interesting.
The list includes the gynesium. The gynesium.
I've never heard of that. It's defined as a harem
or the women's quarters in ancient Greek or Roman
houses. The part of the house where the women
lived, separate from the men. And right next
to that, it lists the andron, which was the men's
quarters. So the man cave isn't a new idea. It's
an ancient one. We've just rebranded it. It's
a very old idea. The separation of domestic space
by gender has incredibly deep roots. And even
in more recent history, if you look at the private
rooms list, we see the boudoir. Which is traditionally
a woman's private sitting room or dressing room.
And the cabinet, which was often a man's private
study or retreat, a room for his collections
or his work. We've always tried to carve out
these gendered niches within the single family
box. Let's talk about food. The list of kitchen
-related rooms is a trip. It's not just kitchen
and pantry. No, it's a glimpse into the complexity
of historical service in a large house. Today,
we have a kitchen, maybe a walk -in pantry, if
we're lucky. But the list includes dirty kitchen
versus kitchenette. A dirty kitchen is interesting.
It's usually a secondary kitchen where the messy,
smelly cooking happens, often found in parts
of Asia or in older grand estates, to keep the
main kitchen pristine and ready for show. Okay,
that makes sense. But then we get to the really
archaic service rooms, the buttery. Which has
nothing to do with butter. It was for restoring
butts of liquor, or casks, the domain of the
butler. Okay, then the scullery. The scullery
was for washing dishes and doing the dirty prep
work, like gutting fish or peeling potatoes.
The place for the scullery made. And then these
two, which are my absolute favorites, the saucery
and the spicery. They're fantastic, aren't they?
I just love the idea that you needed a whole
room dedicated to sauces. What even happens in
a saucery? Well, in a great medieval or Victorian
house, you might need one. The saucery was specifically
for the preparation of sauces and gravies. And
the spicery was for storing spices, which, remember,
were incredibly valuable. You wouldn't just leave
saffron and cloves lying around in the scullery.
They needed their own secure, dry room. It really
emphasizes the sheer scale of these operations.
It wasn't just a home. It was a factory for feeding
people. And we've compressed all of that. In
a modern single -family home, the refrigerator
replaces the larder, the buttery, and the spicery.
The dishwasher replaces the scullery. We've collapsed
the architecture into appliances. That's a deep
thought, but it's true. We replace rooms with
machines. There are also some really specific
unusual spaces listed that I had to look up.
We have the keeping room versus the great room.
A keeping room is an older term. It's usually
a room right next to the kitchen where the family
would sleep or hang out during the winter because
it was the warmest place in the house near the
hearth. A great room is the modern version of
that, a large open -plan space combining the
living room, dining room, and kitchen. and under
the general category of spaces it lists the conversation
pit a classic 1970s architectural feature a sunken
section of the living room lined with cushions
designed for conversation i guess theoretically
mostly for spilling drinks and tripping over
and the source mentions three types of sellers
Root cellar, storm cellar, and wine cellar. All
underground storage, but for very different things.
Potatoes, tornadoes, and Bordeaux. You don't
want to mix those up. And finally, under spaces.
Explicitly listed, which made me so happy. Secret
passage. I love that this made the list. It's
not just a trope from a mystery novel. It validates
every childhood dream I've ever had. If it's
on the list, it's a legitimate room type. I can
officially put it in my house plans. It counts.
So we've toured the history, the structure, and
the rooms, but we have to look forward. Section
6, the 21st century challenge. The source material
ends with a section on modern trends, and it
suggests that the reign of the single -family
home might be facing some serious headwinds.
Significant headwinds. The source identifies
three main conflicts that are challenging the
dominance of this housing type, especially in
North America. Okay, what's conflict number one?
A lack of affordable housing. It's a simple supply
and demand problem, right? Pretty much. We ran
out of cheap land near where the jobs are. The
model of everyone gets a detached box on a big
lot creates artificial scarcity. It drives up
land costs, which drives up housing prices. Conflict
number two. Climate change. specifically the
impacts of urban sprawl and our dependency on
cars. The snout house problem coming home to
roost. Exactly. Low -density housing requires
more driving, which means more emissions. It
requires more infrastructure per person, more
roads, more pipes, and it uses more energy to
heat and cool per person compared to denser housing.
It is, from a climate perspective, very inefficient.
And the third conflict. Concerns about racial
and economic inequality. The source notes that
single -family zoning has, in many cases, been
used historically as a tool to exclude certain
demographics. By keeping housing costs artificially
high and preventing the construction of multifamily
units like apartment buildings, which are often
more affordable from being built in certain neighborhoods,
it can create and perpetuate segregation. So
what is the response to all this? What are cities
doing? Well, according to the source, the policy
response is a significant shift. It reports a
trend towards cities increasingly abandoning
single -family zoning. Abandoning it entirely?
Yes, in some places. They are rezoning areas
that were exclusively for single -family homes
to allow for higher density. The source specifically
cites California and Minneapolis in the reference
titles as places that have made statewide or
citywide changes. They're moving towards allowing
duplexes, triplexes, or fourplexes on what used
to be single -family lots. So the very legal
definition of the single -family lot is changing
under our feet. It's becoming a multifamily lot,
whether the neighbors who bought into the old
idea like it or not. That is the trend being
reported. It's a direct reversal of that post
-World War II suburban boom we talked about earlier.
We are, by necessity, swinging back towards density.
It's so interesting. We started in the communal
village, moved to the isolated suburb, and now,
out of necessity, we might be turning the suburb
back into a kind of village. That is the cycle,
yeah, a new kind of density. So let's wrap this
up. Let's try to synthesize this whole deep dive.
We started with a simple definition, a box surrounded
by air for one family. We saw that this simple
idea is actually a huge historical anomaly made
possible by a very specific moment in time when
land was cheap and energy was abundant. We learned
that even the name is confusing. What's a single
family home here is just a detached house in
the UK. And that small difference says a lot.
We toured the snout house and the mansion. We
saw that as those core variables, the cost of
land, the cost of energy, our social priorities,
as those things change. The house itself is changing.
The single -family detached home is an architectural
expression of an era, and that era might be closing
or at least evolving into something denser and
more complex. It really makes you look at your
own walls differently, doesn't it? It absolutely
does. So I want to leave you with a final thought
today, something for you to mull over. We talked
about that incredible list of rooms you can find
in a house, particularly a mansion. The source
lists server room right alongside bowling alley.
It lists secret passage right alongside stairs.
It lists saucery alongside kitchen. Right. The
old and the new all jumbled together. Exactly.
So here's my question for you listening. If our
homes are defined by the rooms we choose to build
in them, what does the inclusion of a server
room? A room dedicated entirely to connecting
us to the digital world and the near total disappearance
of the parlor. A room that was dedicated to sitting
and talking with other people face to face. What
does that say about the current state of the
family unit? That is the question, isn't it?
We're trading physical connection space for digital
connection space right inside our own homes.
Something to think about the next time you walk
past your router. Thanks for joining us on the
Deep Dive. See you next time.