Brave New Digs

The modern home is a shapeshifter.

Single mothers are sharing houses; committed spouses are living separately. Solo “tiny home” occupants reside in the backyards of friends or family. Unrelated professionals split apartments long-term.

As more people put off (or swear off) marriage and children, nuclear-family households have declined to less than 20 percent of American homes. In How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, psychologist Bella DePaulo introduces some of the domestic experiments that are helping to fill the void. These new homes, many formed by groups of friends rather than discrete family units, present different answers to the challenge of how to create and delineate living space.

For singles, divorcées, retirees, and others, detached suburban houses can be both uneconomical and isolating, according to DePaulo. (One national survey finds the lowest levels of connection between neighbors to be in the suburbs.) “When you have a big home, a huge lawn, and wide separation between houses, it’s a very unfriendly set-up,” she says. Though there seems to be a premium on personal space today, there are other, more creative ways to secure it.

In cohousing neighborhoods, for example, residents have their own places, but share meals, do chores together, and mingle in a common house or green space. Though in the United States, cohousing communities number only in the hundreds, what they seek to accomplish—a rebalancing of autonomy and connection—“is definitely on the rise,” says DePaulo.

Such solutions show how much room there is for imagination and flexibility in creating meaningful spaces for ourselves.

Credit: House by Giorgio Morara/Shutterstock