Home For Life | Roger Dean

ROGER DEAN has designed a house for the new millennium: artistically beautiful, environmentally kind, but cheap and quick to build. It began as a college project to design a child's bed and grew into a radically new form of architecture for a world awakening to the damage done by post-war housing and office development.

The starting point of this new architecture was that child's bed. Dean's research for the project highlighted one central theme that became the basis for all his future designs. He questioned dozens of children about what they liked or disliked about their beds and bedrooms. Again and again, when they spoke of discomfort they were referring not to the softness of the mattress but the "feel" of the room. They said they were afraid of spaces under the bed, where monsters might lurk, or shapes made by clothes hanging on the back doors or highly patterned wallpapers. When asked what they would like, the children described caves or tent-like structures. They wanted to be enclosed; hidden from view but able to see out. In other words, in order to feel comfortable they had to feel safe.
Roger Dean