From dazzling entries to year-round porches, how our priorities have awakened a new era of design.
After more than a year of quarantine life at home, even The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy might click her twinkling heels and say, “There’s no place like a cocktail bar.” The pandemic certainly shaped how we live in our respective domiciles—and did so in real time. “Any dreams that people have been sitting on have in most cases gone active. What are we waiting for?” asks Atlanta architect Bobby McAlpine. “People who have busied themselves as we all have—traveling, and going, and chasing, and using our houses as places where we pick up our dry cleaning—have shifted tremendously. And I think in many cases, people learned how to be home and how to live in their houses.”
And yet the ideal of the American home was already in flux, shifting, as it does, from one decade to the next. To examine just how much our desires and priorities have changed, we polled more than 170 architects and designers on everything from mudroom must-haves to how we host guests. The results are in. Welcome home, where the party’s just beginning.
Dazzling First Impressions
The front yard is the new social zone, says Houston designer J. Randall Powers, who is seeing a resurrection of 1960s-era block parties, with kids and parents (wine glasses in hand) coming together out front and in the street. As a result, clients are asking for street-facing landscapes to be as “knocked out” as their interior rooms, an idea for Powers that’s long overdue. “For us, an entry is like a calling card, so it should always be thoughtful and impressive,” he says. “At my own house, I want it over-the-top. I’ve got so many manicured boxwood balls, it looks like Bunny Mellon threw up in my front yard.”
In Birmingham, Alabama, architect Anna Evans is seeing a similar shift, noting that three different clients recently asked for dining rooms with French doors flanking a front terrace, specifically so their parties can spill out onto the lawn. One even requested a cooler be built into custom benches on either side of the entry. How’s that for a neighborly toast?
The Multitalented Mudroom
It’s shaping up to be the hero of modern households. Three ways the catch-all family entry is leveling up (and cleaning up) the rest of the house.
Scrub-In Station
A place to leave your shoes...and your germs? Extra showers and even laundry are moving closer to the door, notes Dallas designer Jean Liu, in a migration that proves as handy for dirty kids as front-line workers who prefer to decontaminate upon arrival.
Mini Mailroom
Liu is also retrofitting service entries with dedicated surfaces and storage for package deliveries, keeping shipped goods from cluttering entry halls and kitchens. These parcel stations can help simplify returns too, corralling everything from packing tape to labels in one place.
Digital Drop Zone
Want to really connect? Designated charging stations with built-in shelves and strategically placed outlets untether electronics from places like family rooms and kitchens, extra handy for keeping social media and blue lights out of kids’ (and our own) bedrooms.
Privacy Please
Prior to the pandemic, the walls were already closing in on the open floor plan. But there was a slice of freedom in those liberated layouts that we aren’t entirely ready to discard—and we don’t have to. Andrés Blanco of Ferguson & Shamamian Architects on three interior door styles that offer a world of versatility
“Pocket doors build in privacy and—when done right—invite a sense of wonder. In dining rooms, a beautifully detailed door might disappear into the wall to reveal a table set for a lovely dinner party.”
The jib door is, by contrast, largely invisible when closed, “the ultimate tool of the trade. When designed to be fully concealed, it is a true sleight of hand.”
“The HARMON-HINGED DOOR is technically a pocket door, as it folds back into an indentation in a paneled jamb and essentially disappears, creating a sense of openness between rooms. But, like the jib door, there’s a sense of joy in its camouflage.”
For illustrations, decor, and more, visit Veranda.
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