KARIUKI: What will the home of the future look like in 2035?

Back in the 1960s through to the late 1980s, The Jetsons captivated audiences around the world with its playful vision of life in the future.

The animated series imagined a world in the year 2062 where families lived in floating homes, relied on robot assistants and commanded their surroundings through voice alone.

In Kenya, reruns aired well into the 1990s and early 2000s, introducing a generation of viewers to a world where machines quietly handled the routines of daily life.

At the time, those conveniences felt improbable, but, today, more than three decades before the Jetsons’ fictional timeline, many of the show’s once-impossible ideas are edging into reality.

Companies like LG have already introduced into the market refrigerators that can monitor their own inventory and send restocking recommendations to the owner’s phone.

And air conditioners that study their owner’s preferences over time and automatically adjust their output for great comfort. We also have televisions that respond to voice commands and ovens that can tell when a meal is properly cooked, as well as tiny speakers that produce surround-quality sound even in outdoor environments.

But if we imagine the home of 2035 simply as a place filled with smarter gadgets, we may be thinking too small. The real transformation going into the future may not lie in individual devices at all.

It will most likely manifest in homes behaving as adaptive, learning environments that quietly shape the everyday life.

In the coming decade, the house may begin to function less like a collection of rooms and more like a living system. Walls could become responsive surfaces, adjusting insulation and ventilation depending on the weather outside.

A home in Mombasa’s hot afternoons might automatically shift airflow and shading across different rooms, cooling only the spaces that are occupied. At night, those same walls might store heat gathered during the day, gradually releasing it as temperatures fall.

Future homes could harness subtle vibrations generated by footsteps and household activity to create electricity. Floors embedded with micro-generators might capture kinetic energy as residents move through the house, feeding it back into the home’s internal energy system.

Water, too, may circulate differently. Rather than flowing through a one-way pipe system, homes of the future could operate on closed-loop water cycles, where greywater from showers and sinks might be purified within the building itself and reused for consumption.

Small-scale atmospheric water harvesters could extract moisture directly from the air, supplementing supply during dry seasons.

In dense cities like Nairobi, where housing demand continues to outpace supply, homes may also become far more spatially flexible. Instead of fixed rooms dedicated to a single function, living spaces might physically adapt throughout the day.

A wall could retract to transform a living room into a workspace during the morning.

Furniture might emerge from floors or ceilings only when needed, allowing the same area to function as a dining room, study or bedroom. In compact urban apartments, space may become programmable rather than permanent.

Even building materials themselves may evolve with advancements in bio-materials allowing walls to repair small cracks automatically, much like living tissue healing after injury.

Some surfaces may contain micro-organisms that absorb pollutants from indoor air, effectively turning walls into natural filtration systems.

Technology will still play a central role, but it may fade deeper into the background. Rather than commanding individual appliances, residents may interact with their homes more like they interact with weather, through subtle adjustments rather than direct control.

Many homes will learn their occupants’ habits over time, gradually optimising everything from lighting patterns to grocery consumption. Instead of simply alerting residents when food runs low, kitchens could anticipate weekly cooking patterns and coordinate deliveries with neighbourhood supply networks.  

Neighbourhoods themselves may also become interconnected systems, with apartment complexes beginning by 2035 to operate like miniature infrastructure networks, sharing surplus solar power between units, pooling water reserves and coordinating waste recycling through automated sorting systems embedded within the building.

Residents may not think about these systems often, but when one household generates excess electricity during the day, another might draw on it in the evening. As a result, what was once managed by national grids could increasingly be balanced at the level of a single building.

For Kenya’s rapidly expanding middle class, these kinds of innovations may prove especially valuable. With urban populations rising and housing units shrinking, the challenge will be to make existing units more efficient and adaptable rather than increasing their number.

At the same time, the country’s experience with mobile technology offers a powerful lesson about how quickly innovation can spread once it becomes accessible.

Two decades ago, mobile money was an experiment. Today it is embedded in everyday life across both cities and rural areas.

Housing technology could follow a similar path with systems that begin in premium developments gradually filter into mid-range housing, eventually becoming standard features across the urban landscape.

It is unlikely that by 2035, Kenyan homes will resemble the floating apartments of The Jetsons, but it is given that they will share the show’s deeper idea of spaces that anticipate our needs rather than simply contain them.

The writer is the marketing team leader at LG Electronics East Africa