Mike Kobeissi Looks Back at the 2021 Home

Mike Kobeissi’s May 2023 WordPress essay looks back at 2021 and argues that houses that year were redesigned around one fact, that people were spending far more of their lives at home.

The author’s premise is that taste follows the way people live. Once the house became office, gym and refuge at once, he writes, owners asked their rooms to soothe and to work hard, not merely to look good. He sorts what followed into seven currents and treats each as a practical answer to that shift.

Seven currents

He starts with greenery indoors, which he describes as bringing the outdoors into the house through houseplants, planted walls, daylight and raw materials, and which he credits with easing stress and freshening indoor air. Color came next. Owners moved toward clay, sand and spice shades, beige and warm gray among them, which the essay calls a calm base for everything else in a room.

The third current is the room with two jobs. With so many people working where they lived, a study that could also host an overnight guest, a sliding screen or a sofa that folds into a bed let one space shift from work to rest. A fourth is a lighter environmental footprint: salvaged timber and secondhand furniture, along with efficient appliances, LED bulbs and taps that use less water. The author reads this as a sign of growing concern for the planet.

Exercise and rest form the fifth. Gyms were hard to reach, so owners laid suitable flooring, hung mirrors and set aside corners for training, meditation or a bath treated like a spa. The sixth current is nostalgia, expressed through postwar furniture, retro wallpaper and single statement pieces mixed with new ones. The seventh moves outside, where balconies, decks and terraces gained seating, cooking areas and plants so that daily life could spill past the walls. The essay presents these spaces as a way to entertain, unwind and breathe fresh air without leaving the property.

Before and after 2021

Several of these currents were already in view before the year the essay describes. A Mansion Global survey of designers at the start of 2020 found clients treating home as a sanctuary, mixing vintage finds with contemporary pieces, and favoring slow design that weighs where an object comes from and how it was made.¹ The pull toward outdoor rooms is older still; Architectural Digest described a book of houses from Chile to Norway whose terraces and glass walls were planned to erase the line separating interior from exterior.³

The essay ends by predicting that these currents will keep shaping how homes are designed and lived in. A Curbed report from early 2024 adds a caution: brokers and designers told it that taste cycles accelerated during the pandemic, so that finishes chosen around 2020 already looked dated to some buyers within a few years.²