A house redivided: how the pandemic changed our homes

By Virginia Heffernan

Exactly 40 years ago, Faith Popcorn, one of the first people to style herself as a futurist, coined a new meaning for the word “cocooning”. She used it to describe the ambiance sought by 1980s suburbanites as they slouched on their rhino-sized sofas in front of their rhino-sized TVs. In Popcorn’s folktale, the drugs and dancing of the 1970s gave way to a new prestigious pastime: fatigue. Exhausted cocooners, hellbent on dodging the disco, headed for their dens.

The den became the signature room of the era. It was kitted out with brass fittings, stained-glass Tiffany lamps and built-in oak cabinets, and often sunken like a Turkish bath. Those hefty leather couches, with their buttons and studs and beefy rolled Chesterfield arms, seemed somehow alive. The arrangement was designed for reclining, with a date or mates, feet up on a coffee table laden with chicken marsala and, as the decade wore on, large urns of Chardonnay.