Living the dream

The evolution of our houses has given us a lot, but we’ve also lost few things.

Nowhere is the prosperity of modern Australia more evident than in our houses. In retreat is the English-style three-bedroom brick veneer, sitting proudly amid the glorious grandeur of an abutting if not a surrounding lawn. In has come a new kind of housing that is bigger, denser, more Mediterranean, more pragmatic.

The quintessential quarter-acre block has been halved and halved again in an effort to inject affordability within commuting distance of our largest job centres. Gone is the side drive because with the comings and goings of the average household today, the car needs to be positioned near or on the street. The house has been beefed up and because the block has shrunk, it all but touches the fence at the sides. If there is a garage it leads into the laundry, kitchen or hall. The home, the garage and the car seem to have seamlessly merged within a generation.

The house’s roof has all but disappeared from street view, a bit like the receding custom of wearing hats. In the 1950s a fedora completed a man’s outfit just as a pitched roof looked “right” on a suburban bungalow. But why go to the expense of building a pitched roof when it doesn’t snow? And why have shady eaves when we can pay for aircon?

Where there were three bedrooms there are now four, which is odd because there are fewer kids per family today. The old idea of sharing bedrooms with siblings, let alone the concept of bunk beds, has been usurped by the rise of the individual’s right to private space.

The kitchen’s amorous expansions simply cannot be contained. As women were liberated from full-time home-making, it conjoined the lounge room to create the family room. For many, meals are now eaten on the couch in front of the telly. Mind you, the couch has been wilfully complicit in this new eating arrangement by evolving built-in trays. As are low-set coffee tables happy to hold dirty dishes when guests are not around. And eating and drinking aren’t the only new uses for the modern couch; it is also a place for snoozing.

The kitchen’s wanderings haven’t stopped at the couch, for its key function, cooking, has expanded to the barbecue. The back veranda has been given a celebrity makeover and now goes by the name of entertaining deck or al fresco dining zone. In some cases, the sink and the fridge have mutated into smaller forms and taken up positions adjacent to the barbie, now called the outdoor kitchen. There another fridge often sits, waiting for a special occasion to be filled with emergency cheer.

The backyard, once a wilderness of children’s play and a plot for cultivating fruit and vegetables, has been transformed. Gone is the wood heap, the incinerator, the open compost heap; even the once-proud Hills Hoist has been pulled down and replaced with a retractable device quietly stuffed down the blind side of the house. The back yard is now an oasis for adults, who like to sit on outdoor sofas plumped with outdoor cushions. The kids, of course, are inside being creative and making friends… online.

In so many ways, our old style of housing was wasteful and impractical, with unused dining rooms or formal living rooms. Surely the combined kitchen-family room is the hero of the modern house. But I sometimes wonder about what we may have lost.

Today’s housing offers kids little scope for the creativity and sociability that comes from mixing with random other kids, with backyard or street games to be invented, spats to be resolved, and nothing to do but fill the wide open spaces of their imagination.