Scene · Everyday
The Future Was 1986
In 1957, Disneyland built a house to show people how they might live thirty years later. They predicted the future of the house remarkably well. The future of the household was another matter.
In 1957, somebody decided they knew what your house would look like in 1986.
So they built it.
The Monsanto House of the Future opened in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland as a full-scale experiment in domestic life. It was futuristic, synthetic and deliberately optimistic: a home shaped around new materials, new appliances and the promise that technology would make everyday life easier.
There were ideas that now seem wonderfully ordinary. Microwave cooking. Labour-saving kitchen equipment. Hands-free communication. Adjustable lighting. Plastics everywhere.
Look at it from 2026 and the surprising thing isn’t how much they got wrong.
It’s how much they got right.
They were looking at the technology.
The house imagined that the great domestic transformation would happen around us. Better materials. Smarter appliances. More automation. Less physical work.
But the more consequential transformation happened to the people living inside it.
Over the decades that followed, women’s participation in paid work increased dramatically and dual-income households became increasingly normal. That brought independence, opportunity and profound social change.
But something else happened alongside it.
Two incomes increasingly became incorporated into what households could afford — and what they were expected to sustain.
THE OTHER FUTURE
The household became the system.
Housing. Childcare. Education. Pensions. Retirement. Care.
Across different parts of life, households increasingly found themselves earning, borrowing, saving, investing, insuring and planning for risks that had once been carried to a greater extent by employers, institutions or the state.
The future didn’t make us idle.
That’s perhaps the most interesting mistake in the old vision of tomorrow.
Technology really did remove enormous amounts of domestic labour. Machines washed clothes and dishes. Food could be prepared faster. Communication became almost instantaneous. Homes became packed with technology that would have looked extraordinary in 1957.
Yet the household didn’t simply receive all that saved time as leisure.
It acquired new responsibilities.
The modern household became a small economic unit of its own: coordinating work, debt, mortgages, childcare, savings, pensions, education and eventually care.
The machines became more capable.
So did the list of things we had to manage ourselves.
And then they tried to knock it down.
The House of the Future didn’t survive long enough to see the future it had been built to predict.
It closed in 1967.
There is, however, a wonderful final detail. When the time came to demolish the structure, its reinforced plastic shell proved rather less disposable than expected. Accounts of the demolition describe the wrecking ball bouncing off it, leaving workers to dismantle the structure by other means.
A house built to demonstrate the adaptable plastic future had become remarkably difficult to get rid of.
They may have underestimated the future.
They certainly didn’t underestimate the plastic.