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What kind of house would a guy like Dilbert want to live in?
That's the question that kicked off this project. One thing is certain: He'd be appalled at the types of houses generally available, including the newest ones. They're hard to clean, energy piggish, ungreen, hard to rewire, bereft of storage space, and full of rooms that no one ever uses. The home office, if a house even has one, is closet-sized, and the workshop is stuck behind the rear bumper of your car in the garage. Obviously these homes are built to look good first, because that's what sells. Function, ongoing costs and convenience are embarrassing afterthoughts.
If Dilbert built his own house, he'd start with a list of functional requirements that looked like this:
• Zero maintenance inside and out
• Energy usage approaching zero
• Green building materials when practical
• Healthy indoor air quality
• Practical to build, using local contractors
• Inexpensive luxury (emphasizing layout, colors, lighting, function, and design)
• Flexible use rooms
• No wasted "museum spaces" i.e. formal dining room, front room, foyer
• Fully documented, from the home theater to kitchen appliance to maintenance needs
• Address modern lifestyle needs that are often overlooked:
Exercise
Play
Crafts
Home office or two
Home theater
Easy pet maintenance (dog or cat)
Lots of storage for every function
• Some Universal Design (UD) elements so it's wheelchair friendly for later in life.
Starting with those requirements, I asked several hundred thousand Dilbert readers, via the Dilbert Newsletter, to make suggestions on what should be included in Dilbert's house. A number of common themes emerged from the suggestions, and those are documented here.
To make it more relatable, I asked people to assume that Dilbert someday gets married and has kids. (Yes, I know.) So the house needs to accommodate a family, not a single engineer. If it makes you feel better, assume that Dilbert is building the house as a single guy with the intention of making it so desirable to a woman that she might marry him just to live there.
The goal was to focus on forward-thinking, out-of-the box, thoroughly useful house solutions that are practical. When it's done, it should make you scratch your head and say, "Why don't I have that in MY house?"
For the purpose of designing Dilbert's house, we have to assume it's located someplace specific because the climate will drive many of the decisions. So assume Dilbert is a Silicon Valley type of guy. It's a warm California climate, inland, where temperatures don't often dip below 40 degrees in the winter, and summer highs will exceed 100 degrees only a handful of times in midsummer. Cooling is a bigger energy concern than heating.
