The hot design trend of 2024: Comfort
The superrich apparently are looking for "comfort, ease, and quiet luxury." Passivhaus delivers.
Business Insider’s Zoe Rosenberg writes, “Begone fussy decor and all-white interiors. Comfort is the objective for homes in 2024.” She quotes interior designer Robert Stilin in Sotheby’s International Realty Luxury Outlook 2024:
“They want to be comfortable everywhere. They want their bedroom to be comfortable. They want their kitchen to be comfortable. They want their dining room to be comfortable. I have a client who wants to have a sofa or some kind of chaise in his office and in his bathroom in every home that he owns. For another client, where they read is important—so lighting and seating are big factors. Design is becoming more thoughtful. People are taking more time to really think about how they want things to be.”
But what do we mean by comfort? In "Mechanization Takes Command," Siegfried Giedion wrote,
"The word 'comfort' in its Latin origin meant 'to strengthen.' The West, after the eighteenth century, identified comfort with 'convenience': Man shall order and control his intimate surroundings so that they may yield him the utmost ease."
The desire for comfort is not a new trend; Suzanne Shelton picked up on it in her 2022 report, What is Home? She also found that the definition of comfort was changing to be much more like Giedion’s, with more strength and safety than convenience.
Safety and security aren’t just important – they’re the primary way we define comfort. In other words, we can’t feel comfortable in a home if we don’t feel safe and secure in it.
Shelton also found that people realize that comfort isn’t a fancy couch in the bathroom, and security isn’t about locks and alarms; it’s about air quality and airtightness. These come even higher than consistent temperatures. They intuitively know what experts like Robert Bean and Allison Bailes III have been saying for years: comfort doesn’t come from a thermostat.
Bean explained (on his Healthy Heating website, which is getting a much-needed rebuild) that comfort is not a bunch of equipment but a condition of mind. We have an internal thermostat in our hypothalamus that regulates our body temperature, and it is informed by about 165,000 thermal sensors in our skin. What you feel when you are warm or cold is not the temperature but the heat loss or heat gain on your skin.
Engineer Es Tresidder confirms:
“We also lose heat through radiation, regardless of the air temperature, to the solid surfaces surrounding us. This radiative heat loss depends on the temperature of those surfaces and how close we are to them. The warmer they are the less heat we lose in this way; the colder they are the more heat we lose.”
Lisa Heschong explained it more artfully in her wonderful little book, "Thermal Delight in Architecture:"
"There is a basic difference between our thermal sense and our other senses. When our thermal sensors tell us that an object is cold, that object is already making us colder. If, on the other hand, I look at a red object it won't make me grow redder, nor with touching a bumpy object make me bumpy. Thermal information is never neutral; it always reflects what is happening directly to the body. This is because the thermal nerve endings are heat-flow sensors, not temperature sensors. They can't tell directly what the temperature of something is; rather, they monitor how quickly our bodies are losing or gaining heat."
Physicist Allison Bailes explained it less artfully and more hilariously in his infamous post Naked people need building science with an image of a naked man jumping on a bed in front of a big cold window in a warm room.
"Every object radiates heat. The amount of radiant heat it gives off depends on its temperature (to the 4th power!), surface area, and emissivity. So our naked man jumping on the bed in front of the single pane window is giving off not only more views than he’s getting back but also more heat. The surface of the window is much colder and gives off far less heat, so the net flow of radiant heat is away from the man in his birthday suit. He’s cold!"
All these architects, engineers, and phycisists are talking about Mean Radiant Temperature. I complained:
“Understanding MRT changes the way you think about buildings. It's critically important but almost nobody understands it. Sometimes I think nobody wants to understand it because it would mean codes would have to change, the way buildings are designed would have to change, and the way mechanical engineers and contractors work would have to change. And in the 10 years since this article was written, it appears that nobody actually wants to change.”
Now it’s 13 years and still, nothing has changed. But this is why you want the kind of insulation, windows, and air tightness that you get with Passivhaus design. The walls and the windows are warm, and you are comfortable. You don’t have to put on a sweater; the building is your sweater.
It’s a cliché that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location, but a decade ago New Zealand architect Elrond Burrell got his priorities straight in his post, Passivhaus: Comfort, Comfort, Comfort. He describes homes with no overheating, no cold spots, fresh filtered air, and no drafts or draughts as he spells it.
“People rarely think about how much discomfort even a small draught can cause since we’re all pretty used to the odd cold draught here and there. The reality is, though, to be comfortable when we feel a cold draught, we need the room to be a few degrees warmer to counter the discomfort the draught causes.”
All of which brings us back to the superrich and their search for “comfort, ease, and quiet luxury.” I have called Passivhaus a standard of luxury; it delivers thermal comfort, quiet, air quality, and even the security that Shelton found to be so important. I wrote earlier:
“Passivhaus is all about security and peace of mind, knowing that if the power goes out, the temperature doesn’t instantly rise or fall because your home is a giant thermal battery. It is a big thick security blanket wrapping you and your family.”
Michael Ingui of Ingui Architecture in New York City has been pushing Passivhaus as a standard of luxury for years; he told me earlier that sometimes he doesn't even tell clients they are getting the Passivhaus EnerPHit renovation standard; they are not the type to care about the cost of heating or cooling. He does tell them the house will be incredibly quiet and comfortable thanks to the careful sealing, thick insulation, and triple-glazed windows. Clients like the fact that there is a constant supply of filtered fresh air, particularly when forest fires are affecting air quality, even in New York City. And then there is a big benefit for a townhouse in the city: When you seal a party wall so tightly that the air can't get through, neither can the bugs.
Sotheby’s and Business Insider discuss comfort and end up with minibars in the bedroom and sofas in the bathroom. But as Ingui and others (like Prewett Bizley in the UK) have shown many times, Passivhaus isn't just the best standard of efficiency; it is also the standard for comfort and luxury, and it is available to anyone.