Yet home offices haven't really found a natural home. Remodelers have placed them in the attic and the basement, in converted laundry rooms and maid's rooms, or in between, in computer nooks in hallways or bay windows. "The mom's office is usually very close to the hub of the house—breakfast rooms may have an office area for her. But office spaces are generally off the living area," says Peter Duxbury of Duxbury Architects in Los Altos, Calif.

That's true in the Berman house in Larchmont, N.Y., where Karen operates from a work space near the kitchen that matches its decor. For many families, this station is the household-management post, where bills are paid and report cards evaluated. Jeff Berman's office is an attic room that can double as a guest room. As technology has reduced the size of office equipment, many home offices have been getting distinctly homier and less spacious.

That is a good thing in an age in which television screens are getting wall size, and it's one reason media rooms have come into their own. "Everybody has to have their 50-inch plasma TV," says architect Matthew Gottsegen of New York City. The Solomont home has one such giant screen and four smaller ones. "On any given Sunday, we can have 10 to 30 people watching the games," says Sheera Solomont.

In media terms, that's a decidedly one-way experience. The PC and TV have not converged, not in the home office and not in the media room, where folks still prefer not to work. Heck, they don't even want to interact with the television. They're not ordering pizzas, they're not playing movie director and they certainly aren't going over last month's sales reports when the Patriots are playing. "The old idea was that computers and the Internet and phone and TV would all merge," says Adam Keiper, president of the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. "It's an assumption people aren't making anymore."

Instead, says Keiper, convergence is happening elsewhere, in the form of ubiquitous computing. Every appliance is loaded with chips, and each machine can be linked to a central controller. There is a revolution going on behind the walls and in the basement. A whole new style of bundled multipurpose wiring, called structured wiring, is worming its way through the walls, with the capacity to handle cable, audio, satellite, phone and computer traffic. In the basement, computer servers (think of them as home mainframes) are sharing space with furnaces, providing network hookups to every room. Says Gottsegen: "We've seen a huge trend in wiring up houses and apartments that's driven by the need not just for home offices but also for networked audio, video and voice data throughout the house."

All this stuff, plus the lighting, heating and cooling, security, sound system, curtains and window blinds, can be run through a computer controller. George Collins of Peterson & Collins, a high-end builder in Washington, has a client who has taken it to the limit. A computer runs everything from the snowmelt system in the driveway to the temperature of the fish tank to the alerting of the homeowner that someone is in the swimming pool.

Lighting too has "entered a whole new dimension," says Collins. Low-voltage dimming systems now allow users to program the lights in a room to suit a given function, mood or time of day. Even floor lamps are programmable. It's environmental control in two ways: the home's infrastructure is more efficient, and the setting can be made more aesthetically pleasing.

Will our current obsession with shared open spaces and lush private ones look silly years from now? Will future owners rip out these projects, shaking their heads at our excess ("A second oven! What were these people thinking?")? Bet on it. Economic and demographic changes inevitably shape the way we live and the homes we live in. The rapidly increasing number of people age 60 and older, for instance, is already dictating changes in bathroom design and raising other livability issues.

Today we're busily grinding away in an economy that's going nowhere, and our homes are a reflection of that. Sociologist Beck says Americans are so severely deprived of time, particularly leisure and vacation time, that they are trying to make up for it in their living quarters—and are doing a bang-up job. The master suites, the bathroom spas, the game rooms, the professional kitchens and the lobby-like great rooms are our way of turning our once humble abodes into luxury hotels. Feel free to put some chocolate on your pillow.

—With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Lisa McLaughlin and Desa Philadelphia/New York, Jyl Benson/New Orleans, Leslie Everton Brice/Atlanta, Betsy Rubiner/ Des Moines and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles

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