Living space will be about average for a large house. The family living room will be about fourteen by twenty-eight feet, including an area for watching television or listening to music. And there will be cozy spaces for one or two people, although there will also be a reception hall to entertain one hundred comfortably for dinner. I enjoy having get-togethers for new Microsoft employees and summer hires. The house will also have a small movie theater, a pool, and a trampoline room. A sport court will sit amid some trees near the water’s edge, behind a dock for water-skiing, one of my favorite sports. A small estuary, to be fed with groundwater from the hill behind the house, is planned. We’ll seed the estuary with sea-run cutthroat trout, and I’m told to expect river otters.
If you come to visit, you’ll drive down a gently winding driveway that approaches the house through an emergent forest of maple and alder, punctuated with Douglas fir. Several years ago, decomposing duff from the forest floor of a logging area was gathered and spread across the back of the property. All kinds of interesting things are growing now. After a few decades, as the forest matures, Douglas fir will dominate the site, just as the big trees did before the area was logged for the first time at the turn of the twentieth century.
When you stop your car in the semicircular turnaround, although you will be at the front door you won’t see much of the house. That’s because you’ll be entering onto the top floor. First thing, as you come in, you’ll be presented with an electronic pin to clip to your clothes. This pin will connect you to the electronic services of the house. Next, you will descend either by elevator or down a staircase that runs straight toward the water under a sloping glass ceiling supported by posts of Douglas fir. The house has lots of exposed horizontal beams and vertical supports. You’ll have a great view of the lake. My hope is that the view and the Douglas fir, rather than the electronic pin, will be what interest you most as you descend toward the ground floor. Most of the wood came from an eighty-year-old Weyerhaeuser lumber mill that was being torn down out on the Columbia River. This wood, harvested nearly a
hundred years ago, came from trees that were as much as 350 feet tall, between 8 and 15 feet in diameter. Douglas fir is one of the strongest woods in the world for its weight. Unfortunately, new-growth Douglas fir tends to split if you try to mill it into beams, because the grain is not as tight in a seventy-year-old tree as it is in a five-hundred-year-old one. Almost all of the old-growth Douglas fir has been harvested now, and any that remains should be preserved. I was lucky to find old-growth timbers that could be reused.
The fir beams support the two floors of private living spaces you’ll be descending past. Privacy is important. I want a house that will still feel like home even when guests are enjoying other parts of it.
At the bottom of the stairs, the theater will be on the right, and to the left, on the south side, will be the reception hall. As you step into the reception hall, on your right will be a series of sliding glass doors that open onto a terrace leading to the lake. Recessed into the east wall will be twenty-four video monitors, each with a 40-inch picture tube, stacked four high and six across. These monitors will work cooperatively to display large images for artistic, entertainment, or business purposes. I had hoped that when the monitors weren’t in use they could literally disappear into the woodwork. I wanted the screens to display woodgrain patterns that matched their surroundings. Unfortunately I could never achieve anything convincing with current technology, because a monitor emits light while real wood reflects it. So I settled for having the monitors disappear behind wood panels when they’re not in use.
The electronic pin you wear will tell the house who and where you are, and the house will use this information to try to meet and even anticipate your needs—all as unobtrusively as possible. Someday, instead of needing the pin, it might be possible to have a camera system with visual-recognition capabilities, but that’s beyond current technology. When it’s dark outside, the pin will cause a moving zone of light to accompany you through the house. Unoccupied rooms will be unlit. As you walk down a hallway, you might not notice the lights ahead of you gradually coming up to full brightness and the lights behind you fading. Music will move with you, too. It will seem to be everywhere, although, in fact, other people in the house will be hearing entirely different music or nothing at all. A movie or the news will be able to follow you around the house, too. If you get a phone call, only the handset nearest you will ring.
You won’t be confronted by the technology, but it will be readily and easily available. Handheld remote controls will put you in charge of your immediate environment and of the house’s entertainment system. The remote will extend the capabilities of the pin. It will not only let the house identify and locate you, it will also allow you to give instructions. You’ll use the controls to tell the monitors in a room to become visible and what to display. You’ll be able to choose from among thousands of pictures, recordings, movies, and television programs, and you’ll have all sorts of options available for selecting information.
A console, which will be the equivalent of a keyboard that lets you give very specific instructions, will be discreetly visible in each room. I want consoles that are noticeable to those who need them, but that don’t invite attention. A characteristic, easy-to-identify feature will alert the user to the identity and whereabouts of the consoles. The telephone has already made this transition. It doesn’t attract particular attention to itself; most of us are comfortable putting a nondescript phone on an end table.
Every computerized system should be made so simple and natural to use that people don’t give it a second thought. But simple is difficult. Still, computers get easier to use every year, and trial-and-error in my house will help us learn how to create a really simple system. You will be able to be indirect about your instructions and requests. For example, you won’t have to ask for a song by name. You will be able to ask the house to play the latest hits, or songs by a particular artist, or songs that were performed at Woodstock, or music composed in eighteenth-century Vienna, or songs with the word “yellow” in their titles. You will be able to ask for songs that you have categorized with a certain adjective, or songs that haven’t been played before when a particular person was visiting the house. I might program classical music as background for contemplating and something more modern and energetic to play while I’m exercising. If you want to watch the movie that won the 1957 Academy Award for best picture, you can ask for it that way—and see The Bridge on the River Kwai. You could find the same movie by asking for films starring Alec Guinness or William Holden or ones about prison camps.
If you’re planning to visit Hong Kong soon, you might ask the screen in your room to show you pictures of the city. It will seem to you as if the photographs are displayed everywhere, although actually the images will materialize on the walls of rooms just before you walk in and vanish after you leave. If you and I are enjoying different things and one of us walks into a room where the other is sitting, the house will follow predetermined rules about what to do. For example, the house might continue the audio and visual imagery for the person who was in the room first, or it might change programming to something it knows both of us like.