There is no place like home—even if it keeps changing. After all, the places where we live in 2026 look very different than they did a few years ago: the style and decor, the technology and electronics, even the way houses are insured and protected from natural disasters.
The outdoor forces that shape our daily lives today will also inform what makes a home desirable—and safe—decades from now. To help readers navigate that transition, Architectural Digest and WIRED have collaborated on a series of stories about what the next era of “home” might look like. Here, AD global editors and WIRED editors, Amy Astley and Katie Drummond, talk about the thought that went into this special issue.
AMY ATLEY: Katie, I’m so excited to share our first digital issue with everyone. When we started talking about working together, we kept coming back to the same question: What do we really want in our homes, and what do we need from them? At AD, we have always believed that where we live should be a place of beauty and comfort. But lately it feels like the concept of home has become more complicated. People face all kinds of concerns—climate issues, material costs, new technologies—that go far beyond what color to paint their living rooms.
KATIE DRUMMOND: I agree. And that talking variable is on the mind, especially with the rapid development and integration of AI. At WIRED, we spend a lot of time thinking about and writing about how technology is embedded in our lives. For us, the question isn’t whether your home will become smart—it will, whether you actively want it to or not—but how you’ll actually use the technology. Most importantly, where will it be useful? And when will it be seamless? The promise of a smart home, where you walk in and everything is automatically adjusted to your preferences, is still a dream.
ASTLEY: We all want technology that improves life, but smart homes must acknowledge current realities. Fred Bernstein describes Olson Kundig’s Shearwater house, suspended on steel poles 23 feet from the ground (“higher than a mosquito,” jokes AD100 architect and Olson Kundig founder Tom Kundig), as beautiful in appearance, but built for the real and urgent risk of rising tides. Solid design used to sound extreme, and now it’s essential. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Fazzare reports that around the world, architects are turning to local, low-tech materials like compacted earth, bamboo, and fireproof timber. For them, the future may lie in rethinking what we already know works.
DRUMMOND: That idea comes from our profile of Stewart Brand, countercultural icon and author of The Whole Earth Catalogue. He is now 87 years old and has built a modern natural home designed for his stage of life in the area where he lives with his wife in Petaluma, California. As life expectancy increases, the way people age in place, and the technology they use to facilitate that, is also changing. Steven Blum wrote about this in his touching story of watching over his elderly father with an always-on microphone, and how complicated, and perhaps very invasive, that kind of help can be.
ASTLEY: I’ve read other pieces on the topic of helping people I love with technology, though those mostly focus on robot friends or smart trackers. Steven’s unique take was truly moving, especially as he considered the loneliness gap that this technology could not bridge.