5 once essential luxury home features that will soon be passé
5 once essential luxury home features that will soon be passé
What’s in and what’s out for 2017
Breathless tech advancements, coupled with paradigm shifts in mores and consumption, have had a transformative effect on the way abodes are architected and used. What luxury home owners prized as de rigueur even five years ago are slowly going out of fashion.
Luxury home owners are always raring to be early adopters: on the hunt for the most expensive, state-of-the-art amenities before they trickle down to the masses. “Comfort cooling was once a luxury appliance, but now it is fairly standard across many new developments,” said Peter Preedy, associate director for residential at Jones Lang LaSalle UK. “Certain amenities are tested at the top end of the market, refined and then filtered down. Like catwalk fashions and colours filtering down to the high street over the course of a season.”
The following are just a few new must-have amenities in luxury homes today, and the can-do-without’s they are slowly replacing.
Out: Home theatres
In: VR rooms
It looks like having the biggest home theatre today, with all the bells and whistles of a Dolby cinema, is no longer the height of luxury. The truly first-class alternative is to equip your house with a dedicated virtual reality (VR) room, which takes up less space for arguably twice the visual impact.
“Our clients are requesting fully immersive, VR environments because they’re super-busy and want the highest forms of escapism,” architect Duan Tran of KAA Design told Bloomberg. “Right now, you might need to have 1,000 square feet dedicated to a home theater (but it soon) could be a 6-foot-by-6-foot room for the same programming.”
Out: Master bedrooms
In: Private chambers
Cavernous, open-plan sleeping quarters that revolve around the bed may be passing into obsolescence. Taking their place are smaller suites, subdivided into clear-cut areas for changing and bathing, plus such indulgences as a study, library, and spa. “The concept of a master bedroom is becoming obsolete because we have a different relationship with sleep now — we don’t hang out in the bedroom the way we used to,” Jonah Disend, founder of innovation firm Redscout, told Bloomberg.
Factoring into this fact is that millennials are turning out to be inherently prudish. For all their predilection for pornography, millennials sure like to hide their modesty. “Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” he noted.
More: 5 must-haves in the homes of the world’s richest
Out: Garages
In: Flexi-garages, long private driveways
The ride-sharing economy, plus the rise of driverless cars, will reduce parking space by 25 percent in 2050, freeing up 61 billion square feet of extra living space, Bloomberg reported, citing a McKinsey report. As a result, luxury home owners, especially those in vertical developments, design their garages for future adaptive reuse as offices or even residential spaces.
Also, as garages get shorter shrift, private driveways are booming in New York City’s apartment blocks.
Out: Showcase kitchens
In: Centralised cooking, catering amenities
The meteoric rise of UberEats, Blue Apron, Amazon Prime Now, and other app-powered food delivery services has made home-cooking an even more tedious venture than it is. This has led residents to hole up in luxe apartment blocks with in-house catering and takeaway services. One example of this trend is the restaurant at Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue, manned by Michelin-starred chef Shaun Hergatt, Bloomberg pointed out.
Out: Helipads
In: Drone pads
While helipads are still imperative for that quick getaway, luxury home residents have found it ever more urgent to have their own drone landing pads. This is a concept being pioneered in the Los Angeles condominium tower Ten50. With Amazon already priming drones as delivery vehicles, such amenities are guaranteed to be part of house must-haves lists everywhere.
Read next: 5 ultimate luxury home must-haves in 2016
Source: Property Report