I have seen the future—the house of the future. It demonstrates great ideas, but it’s not so functional.

The Living Tomorrow House is located in Vilvoorde, outside Brussels, Belgium. It is open for guided tours (10 Euro, about $10 U.S.). The house uses innovative construction techniques, appliances, and ideas that could change our lifestyle. Some of these ideas are well integrated, while others are clearly product placements with no integration into the construction and utility of the house.

The house is well designed, spacious, and beautifully appointed. Many windows have Venetian blinds sealed between two panes of glass—no cleaning! Rather than using long rods and strings to open, close, raise, and lower the blinds, the blinds are connected to a computer that controls these functions. Many of the walls were painted using an unusual technique—layers of paint are applied with a palette knife, then buffed to smoothness. The result looks like stone or laminate, but scratches are easily buffed away. The hallway has a large, interesting metal sculpture, and ceilings are very high nearly everywhere but the kitchen.

The coolest feature in the kitchen is the induction stovetop. Magnets beneath each burner cause ferrous atoms in the saucepan to move. This bumping generates heat, and eventually warms the food or liquid in the saucepan. The glass on the induction stovetop does not generate heat, but it does become warm where the pan had been placed. In homes with small children, induction cooking offers more safety than other options.

I realized partway through the tour that many of the items shown were in fact donated or lent to the Living Tomorrow House. The kitchen listened in French, while the shower and tub listened only in Flemish. Why? Microsoft provided the online grocery ordering software in the kitchen, but another company (Lernhout and Haupsie) provided the software used to voice-activate the plumbing in the bathroom.

Something in nearly every room of the house requires a connection to a server room in the basement. If the server goes down, the homeowner may need to call a technician not only to get the heat back on, but also to close the curtains or to watch television. Emergency visits from plumbers and electricians are quite expensive. I have no idea what a system administrator would charge at 2:00 a.m. to fix a registry problem.

The house’s exterior uses four materials: stucco over concrete blocks, load-bearing concrete panels, corrugated metal, and an enormous glass exterior envelope. I’m not sure what maintenance the stucco, concrete panes, and corrugated metal require, but I’d be quite unhappy if this combination of materials meant I needed different maintenance companies for each of them. The features of these materials, though, are beautifully demonstrated: the concrete blocks beneath the stucco have many air voids, meaning that they provide better insulation than ordinary concrete blocks. The concrete panels look as if they would require minimal maintenance. The windows are simply beautiful, extending nearly 40 feet up. Inside the house a catwalk allows the homeowner to access the top of the windows, but the windows overlook a pond. I don’t know how to clean the outside of these windows!

The trash chutes illustrate how the house’s planners fell short in their vision. In the basement are bins to collect glass, metal, plastics, paper, laundry, and garbage. A tube hangs from the ceiling over each bin. The homeowner would put his dirty shirt in the top end of the chute, and gravity would pull it to the basement. Where is the top end of the laundry chute? In the bathroom, which makes some sense...but so is the top end of all the other chutes. In addition, the chutes are not functional. The architect and the builder did not design the house to have these features—they were an afterthought. My grandparent’s house, built in the 1940s, had a laundry chute and a coal chute, so this is not exactly a new idea.

The Living Tomorrow House provides a thought-provoking tour of future housing, with a mix of usable products and features side-by-side with concepts clearly not evaluated for usability by the designers. It will be interesting to watch the concepts in this house evolve. For more information about Living Tomorrow see www.livtom.be