The Dilbert House

The Dilbert House

Scott Adams’ invitation to tour Dilbert’s Ultimate House:

First, let me give you some background.
As you probably know, most of the people who design houses hate your guts. For example, they know you’ll never use the formal living room, yet they include it so you’ll have to pay extra. They tease you with a fancy-schmancy dining room, making you fantasize about hosting important dinners for heads of state, despite the reality that you eat your meals directly from the refrigerator.

Lord help you if you want to get a cat, because there’s no good place in your house for heaping mound of stinky kitty litter. Or maybe you want to do some rewiring for your sound system and you realize you don’t have time to train the team of genetically enhanced burrowing squirrels that would be needed to run the new cables through your walls. Do you want lots of space for storage? Forget about it, because you used your closet for the home office. Have you looked at your gas and electric bill lately? It makes you want to drive your SUV to Saudi Arabia and start slapping anyone who’s in a good mood.

Any decent engineer could tell you that the way to design a house is to first gather the requirements about the occupant’s lifestyle and THEN design the house, taking into consideration the best thinking in energy efficiency, economy, and maintenance. So that’s what we did, sort of, by tapping into the global mind of several thousand Dilbert readers who sent ideas for the Dilbert Ultimate House (DUH). Then we narrowed down the ideas with experts in the fields of energy, design, and construction. The result is the thoroughly practical, sometimes whimsical, spectacularly innovative home you are about to see. I hope you enjoy your tour and, with any luck, learn something along the way.

Scott Adams