Disneyland’s original Monsanto House of the Future/ © Corbis

The future, then and now

Disneyland’s new Innoventions Dream Home brings back memories of 1957’s Monsanto House of the Future.

By Jim Washburn for MSN City Guides

The kitchen in the new Innoventions /© Bruce Hazelton/ZUMA.

Disney’s new Innoventions Dream Home isn’t your father’s house of the future. Back when your dad or granddad was doing Disneyland circa 1957, the Monsanto House of the Future was Tomorrowland’s vision of urban utopia. It boasted curved Polaris white plastic walls and huge panes of Eichler-era windows, also plastic. Its shape, viewed from above, was that of a stylized + sign: The rooms emanated at right angles from a central hub, which was the only part of the house that touched the ground.

The rest hovered several feet above the earth, an apt architectural metaphor for a dwelling whose chemical company sponsor boasted that no natural materials were used in its construction.

The House of the Future had some things right, predicting microwave ovens, push-button phones and flat panel TVs. But somehow 1986 — the year the house was intended to depict — came and went without many of us buying ultrasonic dishwashers or taking up residence in a suspended plastic ice cube tray.

And natural materials? Not only are they a staple of today’s homes, they abound in the future as well, at least in the one the Innoventions Dream Home envisions. In the latest stab at domestic prognostication, they’ve taken us “just one small step into the future,” says Disney designer Tom Zofria. He’s responsible for the overall look of the Dream Home, in which Disney partnered with HP, Microsoft, Life/Ware and homebuilder Taylor Morrison. Although the 5,000-square-foot dwelling is bursting with cutting-edge technology, it has a warm, timeless feel due to Zofria’s wood-rich craftsman-meets-art-nouveau design. In that setting, a kitchen that talks to you and a mirror that can overlay a digital wardrobe on your image seems right at home.

That was the idea, Zofria said. “The partners — Microsoft, HP, Life/Ware and Taylor Morrison — gave me the design challenge of making this home feel familiar and comfortable, because homes aren’t going to be tremendously different a few years down the road. But since this is Tomorrowland, I felt I needed to make it at least one distinct step into the future, so I looked at the neo-craftsman thing that’s popular now and wondered what might be the next step from that. In Europe there’s a resurgence of the nouveau look, so I thought that was a wonderful thing to bring into the next phase of design. Plus it’s a design theme that appears again and again in science fiction films so it seemed like a natural fit to me.”

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The future, then and now

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