Defining Luxury In Modern Terms

Chris Sanderson, co-founder of Future Laboratory, talks about the evolving definition of luxury for homeowners in an urban context.

Our perception and idea of luxury has changed. Many would say that the real luxury nowadays is actually time. Time for ourselves to do whatever we want or to spend with our families and friends. Some of the most important things in life are intangible and small in size. In addition, it’s also changing in some fundamental ways due to the fact that it is really no longer so much about the products in a home but the space itself.

It’s more about the experience, and in this decade that we’ve termed ‘the transformative twenties’ our concerns as individuals, as humans are so much more existential. We’re really increasingly concerned about water, about heat, about energy, about light and about space. And we’re concerned about those things from the idea of both how much we use and consume those resources, but also how much we’re going to share them.

In the past, luxury traditionally meant superfluidity. It was about having more of everything. But as we move into a situation where more and more of us are living in more densely populated megacities, I think it’s really crucial to rethink this notion of luxury.