We spent a generation designing homes that are healthier for the planet. The next generation will also be designed around the health of the people living inside them.
For most of human history, we didn’t ask very much of our homes. Keep the rain out. Keep the animals out. Keep us reasonably warm. A roof, some walls and a fire were a fairly decent start.
Then we became more ambitious. We added plumbing, electricity, central heating, air conditioning, better insulation, bigger kitchens, smarter appliances and eventually enough technology that I can now turn my lights on from another continent, should I ever feel the need.
More recently, we started asking an altogether more important question: what is our home doing to the planet?
That question changed an entire industry. We began measuring energy efficiency, improving insulation, installing solar panels, reducing water consumption, thinking more carefully about materials and designing buildings that use fewer resources. Today, a high-performance home is increasingly judged by how lightly it sits on the environment around it.
All of that is progress. But I think we’ve missed half the equation.
We’ve spent decades asking whether our homes are healthy for the planet. We are only beginning to ask whether they are healthy for us.
And I suspect that question is going to change the home again.
The environment we rarely think about
My interest in this started in much the same way as most of my interest in longevity: by becoming the guinea pig.
When I made myself the slightly ridiculous promise that I wanted to ski and play tennis on my hundredth birthday, I naturally started looking at all the things we now associate with longevity. Nutrition. Exercise. Sleep. Bloodwork. Recovery. Supplements. Biological age. VO2 max. The list gets rather long rather quickly.
But eventually I started looking around my house and realised something embarrassingly obvious.
I spend an enormous percentage of my life here.
While we’re busy measuring what is happening inside our bodies, we spend surprisingly little time measuring the environment those bodies are living in. Yet every day we’re breathing the air in our homes, drinking the water, responding to the light, sleeping in the bedrooms, preparing food in the kitchens and putting dozens of products on and around our bodies.
In a recent conversation about the future of longevity, I described health in terms of inputs and outputs. We tend to obsess over the outputs: our sleep score, cholesterol, glucose, biological age, body composition, VO2 max and the ever-expanding collection of numbers generated by our watches and rings.
But what is producing those outputs?
Our genetics obviously matter, as do age and all sorts of things we cannot easily change. But many of the inputs are much closer to us: what we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how much stress we experience and, importantly, the environment we spend our lives in.
As I said during that conversation, it’s not just data about your body. It’s data about your environment.
Part of the reason we haven’t traditionally thought this way about our homes may simply be that buildings have been easier to measure than humans. We learned to calculate energy consumption, insulation performance and water efficiency long before we could continuously measure sleep, glucose, recovery, air quality and dozens of other signals around the people living inside them.
That’s beginning to change.
Your house is already interacting with your biology
A home doesn’t have to be obviously unhealthy to influence us.
Air is perhaps the easiest example because we don’t have much choice about whether to consume it. Radon, carbon monoxide, particulate matter from cooking, inadequate ventilation, moisture and mold, smoke and volatile organic compounds can all become relevant depending on the home, location and circumstances. The point isn’t that every house contains every problem. It is that some of the most consequential things in our environment are remarkably easy to ignore precisely because we can’t see them.
The same is true of water. Most of us turn on the tap and assume the problem has been solved somewhere upstream. Usually that is a reasonable assumption, but the final few metres matter too. Household plumbing can introduce contaminants such as lead, while private wells and local water conditions create their own set of variables.
Then there is light, something I think we’re going to understand far better over the next decade. For most of our evolutionary history, light was a remarkably reliable signal. Bright during the day. Dark at night. Our modern homes have somewhat muddled the arrangement. We can now spend the day inside relatively dim buildings and the evening surrounded by artificial light and illuminated screens.
Temperature, humidity, sound and the way a bedroom is designed also create the environment in which we try to sleep and recover. None of this means we should become frightened of our houses. Quite the opposite.
I think the future is about making the invisible visible, then doing something sensible with the information.
From the building to everything we put inside it
Once I started thinking about the home as a health environment, I realised the walls are really only the beginning.
We have spent decades asking what our houses are made from. I think we’re going to start asking what our lives inside those houses are made from.
Look around your kitchen. Cookware. Cutting boards. Food containers. Drinking bottles. Cleaning products. The materials we heat food in and the products we use to clean the surfaces where we prepare it.
Then walk into the bathroom. Shampoo. Conditioner. Toothpaste. Deodorant. Moisturiser. Cosmetics. Fragrances. Sunscreen. Soap. Laundry detergent on the towels and sheets.
The point is not that all of these things are dangerous. They’re not. Nor do I have much interest in joining the slightly exhausting corner of the wellness world where everything is apparently toxic and we’re all one shampoo away from catastrophe.
The more useful question is one of exposure, evidence and priority.
If you have a significant radon problem, buying a different toothpaste probably isn’t where I’d start. If your home has unsafe carbon monoxide levels or a serious moisture problem, replacing every plastic container in the kitchen while ignoring those issues would be rather missing the point.
The healthy-home conversation needs a hierarchy. What is the potential severity? How strong is the evidence? How much are you actually exposed to? Is there a particular reason you may be susceptible? And, perhaps most practically, is there something sensible you can do about it?
That is very different from trying to create a perfectly “non-toxic” life, whatever that means.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s better information followed by better decisions.
Then we started bringing the longevity clinic home
There is another fascinating change happening. Not only are we beginning to think differently about the home itself and the products we use inside it, we’re deliberately bringing health and longevity technology into the house.
Saunas used to be something you encountered at a health club or spa. Now they’re appearing in homes. Cold plunges have followed them. Photobiomodulation, or red-light therapy, is moving into bedrooms, gyms and recovery spaces. Exercise technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Sleep systems can control mattress temperature. Air-quality monitors sit quietly in the background. Water filtration is becoming smarter. Wearables generate streams of physiological information around the clock.
For some people, the home is beginning to resemble a small biohacking laboratory. I say that with some affection because I’ve been one of them.
But there is a problem.
We keep adding things.
I told a story on the Futurecaster podcast about interviewing a prospective Argentis member who was spending thousands of dollars every month on his health. He went to a gym, a cold-plunge facility, Upgrade Labs and several other places. He was highly motivated and doing an impressive number of things.
So I asked him a simple question: how are you measuring what’s working?
He looked at me rather blankly.
That moment has stuck with me because I think it describes where much of the longevity industry is today. We’re getting extraordinarily good at doing the doing. We’re not nearly as good at connecting the dots.
The same risk exists in the home. We can fill a room with saunas, plunges, lights, sensors and expensive machines without necessarily creating a healthier environment.
I don’t think the healthy home of the future will be the house with the most gadgets. I think it will be the house where the environment, the products and the technology have been considered as one system.
From smart home to healthy home
We already have smart homes.
I’m just not convinced they’re particularly smart about us.
My thermostat knows what temperature I like. My lights can be automated. My security system knows when someone walks onto the property. Somewhere, presumably, there is a refrigerator deeply concerned about whether I’m running low on milk.
But the home itself still knows remarkably little about the health of the people living inside it.
Imagine a home where air quality is continuously monitored and ventilation or filtration responds when needed. Where lighting changes naturally throughout the day. Where bedrooms are designed first and foremost around recovery. Where water quality is understood rather than assumed. And where environmental information can sit alongside physiological data and help us begin to understand relationships between the two.
Did I sleep badly because I ate late? Drank alcohol? Had a stressful day? Was the room too hot? Was the air quality poor?
Today we collect pieces of that puzzle in different places. Artificial intelligence will increasingly help us connect them.
The opportunity isn’t simply to collect more data. God knows we have enough of that already. The opportunity is to make the data less visible while making the intelligence more useful.
I don’t want another twenty dashboards to check every morning.
I want the environment to learn.
The healthiest choice should require less thought
This connects to something I’ve been thinking about at a much larger scale in Park City.
If we genuinely want healthier populations, we need to design healthier defaults. The home may be the most intimate version of that idea.
If indoor air is being properly managed through source control, ventilation and filtration where appropriate, I don’t need to make a health decision every time I take a breath. If the water is appropriately assessed and treated where necessary, I don’t have to make a decision every time I turn on the tap. If the lighting environment changes naturally with the day, I don’t have to become an amateur lighting engineer. If the kitchen makes preparing healthy food easy, the healthier decision requires less effort.
This is where I think the healthy-home movement becomes genuinely interesting. It stops being about buying wellness products and starts becoming about reducing the number of health decisions we have to make.
The healthiest home may ultimately be the one where we think about our health less, not more.
But please, open the front door
There is an obvious danger in all of this.
We could build a beautifully filtered, perfectly lit, temperature-controlled, sensor-filled longevity cocoon and decide never to leave it.
That would rather miss the point.
One of the things I pushed back on during my Futurecaster conversation was the idea that the future is simply about creating increasingly automated indoor environments. I think the opposite movement is just as important.
We need to bring the outside in—and ourselves back outside.
Human beings have spent hundreds of thousands of years interacting with natural light, changing temperatures, fresh air, uneven ground, weather, plants, other people and the rhythms of day and night. Our homes should support human biology, but they shouldn’t attempt to replace nature.
I live in Park City, so perhaps I have an unfair advantage here. Mountains have a rather effective way of reminding you that the best piece of wellness technology may occasionally be opening the door and going for a walk.
The future healthy home, in my view, sits in balance between human, technology and nature. Technology should quietly improve the environment, the environment should support the human, and the home should make it easier—not harder—for us to remain connected to the world outside it.
A new definition of a high-performance home
I think we’re approaching another shift in what determines the value of a home.
For generations, we valued location, size, bedrooms, bathrooms, views and finishes. Then energy performance entered the equation.
Increasingly, I think health performance will too.
When people buy a home, why wouldn’t they eventually want to understand its air quality, water, light, environmental exposures and ability to support sleep and recovery? Why wouldn’t those things become part of due diligence alongside the roof inspection and property survey?
When I spoke about this on Futurecaster, I suggested that people will become smarter about assessing their environment before buying a home and eventually mapping that information against their own longevity goals.
A family with young children may care about one set of things. Someone in their seventies may care about another. An athlete may want something different again. There probably isn’t one universally perfect healthy home because there isn’t one universally perfect human.
We are all, to some degree, an N of one.
The opportunity is to understand both sides of the equation better: the person and the place. And then connect them.
Perhaps one day a home’s health performance will influence its value in much the same way energy efficiency increasingly does today. Perhaps buyers will expect an environmental health assessment alongside a conventional inspection. Perhaps developers will compete not simply on marble countertops and mountain views, but on measurable improvements in the environments they create.
I think they will.
Look at your home differently
You don’t need to rebuild your house or order a sauna after reading this. In fact, please don’t start there.
The next time you walk through your front door, try looking at your home not simply as a collection of rooms, but as a collection of inputs.
What are you breathing? What are you drinking? What light is your body receiving? Where are you sleeping? What are you cooking with? Which products are you using every day? Which things are potentially important and which are simply the latest wellness obsession?
Then ask a much better question.
What is actually worth changing?
Don’t start with what’s fashionable. Start with what matters.
From shelter to health infrastructure
If you stand back, the evolution is quite extraordinary.
Our homes began as shelter. Then we designed them for comfort, convenience, efficiency and eventually sustainability.
I think the next era is health.
Not health as another luxury amenity. Not a cold plunge beside the swimming pool so the brochure can use the word “longevity.” And not a house so obsessed with optimization that living in it becomes a full-time job.
Something much quieter.
A home that understands that the human beings inside it are biological systems constantly interacting with their surroundings. A home that gives us better inputs, makes healthier behaviour easier, uses technology when technology is useful and gets out of the way when it isn’t. A home that connects us back to nature rather than sealing us away from it.
And ultimately, perhaps, a home where health becomes almost invisible because more of the right things are simply happening in the background.
That’s where I think we’re heading.
We’ve spent a generation trying to build homes that use less energy.
Perhaps the next generation will build homes that help the people inside them have more of it.
The Bigger Question
If our homes are already influencing our health every hour of every day, shouldn’t we start measuring their performance by what they do for the people living inside them—not only what they do to the planet?
A little of the science behind this essay
This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive review of healthy-building science. These are some of the areas and authoritative sources that informed my thinking.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provides guidance on indoor air quality, including particulate matter, radon, ventilation, mold and moisture, and volatile organic compounds. Its guidance also emphasizes that improving indoor air generally starts with controlling important sources of pollution, supported by ventilation and filtration where appropriate.
The EPA and CDC provide guidance on drinking-water quality, lead exposure and private wells, all of which reinforce the point that the quality of the water arriving at a property does not necessarily tell you everything about the water ultimately coming out of the tap.
Research into circadian biology continues to show that light is an important environmental signal for the human body, with the timing, duration and intensity of light exposure helping regulate sleep and circadian rhythms.
There is also growing research into the relationship between bedroom temperature, the thermal environment and sleep, although—as with much of human biology—the answer is more nuanced than finding one supposedly perfect temperature for everyone.
The healthy-home assessments we are developing at Argentis deliberately prioritize established and consequential risks such as radon, carbon monoxide, drinking-water safety, particulate matter, moisture, ventilation and major safety hazards before lower-priority product substitutions. The objective is not to create fear around every exposure. It is to understand what matters most and act accordingly.
The conversation that helped shape this essay
I recently joined Kim Bates on the Futurecaster podcast to talk about longevity in the home, environmental data, AI, healthier communities and what happens when our homes begin to understand more about the people living inside them.
One of the ideas we discussed was the shift from measuring only the body to also measuring the environment around it. We also talked about the growing complexity of longevity technology, the need to understand whether interventions are actually working, and why the home may become an increasingly important part of preventative health.
Watch: Futurecaster — Longevity, Healthy Homes and the Future of Wellness Real Estate
Listen: Futurecaster — Longevity, Healthy Homes and the Future of Wellness Real Estate
Rethinking the healthy home?
I’m particularly interested in working with developers, architects, hospitality groups and health innovators who are asking what comes after sustainability—and what it means to design places around human health.
Start a Conversation → Ideas@argentis.com
