When I first moved to Florida in March 1998, I drove by Xanadu, Home of the Future on Highway 192 nearly every day for four years. Despite visiting Central Florida several times since 1983, I never visited this roadside attraction. One early Saturday morning in the year 2000, I stopped by the home with my Canon EOS Rebel 2000 film camera to capture what was left of this vision of the future.
WHAT WAS XANADU, HOME OF THE FUTURE IN KISSIMMEE, FLORIDA?
Xanadu, Home of the Future in Kissimmee, Florida was the dream of Bob Masters and Eric Wolter who spotted a piece of land on the shore of Lake Cecile near the intersection of U.S. 192 and highway 534 in Kissimmee, Florida. The Google Earth image above shows the attraction in December 2003.
The destination was close enough to Walt Disney World Resort which had just opened EPCOT Center in October 1982. Disney’s “permanent World’s Fair” would celebrate the 21st Century and cultures of the world. The duo hoped to glean visitors from the “Vacation Kingdom of the World” at their new second-tier Central Florida attraction.
The name “Xanadu” was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem titled “Kubla Khan” which contained the lines, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree:”.
With a $175,000 investment from Rod Hartless, Bob and Eric purchased the land for their dream home attraction. This new attraction was not the first futuristic home for Masters. He first prototype home was constructed in Aspen, Colorado in 1969. Ten years later, he constructed more homes in Wisconsin and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. For the Kissimmee location, he wanted something educational based that would show the public the possibility of tomorrow.
“These are education-based attractions … to show extremely advanced technology that … few people actually know about,” said Sandy Eagan from an Orlando advertising agency representing Bob in 1983. “There will be a house ‘brain’ – a computer – to control lighting, security and temperature, a kitchen dietician computer, an autochef and robot and a sensorium which will have educational video games.”
In July 9, 1983 article published in The Orlando Sentinel, Bob Masters described the purpose of Xanadu, which would be similar to Disney’s EPCOT Center but on a “smaller scale.”
“[Xanadu] showcases the leading edge of available consumer technology’ and anticipates household appliances that don’t exist yet, ‘but probably will within the next 20 years.”
The attraction would also exhibit products manufactured by companies that “couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to sponsor an EPCOT Center pavilion.”
An article from the Tampa Bay Times in August 1983 showed the Robutler which welcomed visitors to Xanadu. It was supposed to “serve drinks, fetch things, hang up clothes and vacuum the floor.”
“Everybody lives in a house of some type,” explained Eagan as to why a futuristic home was made as an attraction. “It’s something that’s close to everyone, that everyone can relate to.”
WHO DESIGNED XANADU, HOME OF THE FUTURE?
After Masters secured the land, he needed an architect to design his vision. Enter Roy Mason, a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and founder of the World Future Society. Founded in 1966, the society is an international community of futurists and future thinkers. The began publishing a magazine, “The Futurist” in 1967 to which Mason contributed several articles.
Mason was passionate about “smart homes,” something found today in homes around the world with devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Ring camera, iRobot vacuum cleaners and more. In the early 1980s, however, this idea was a distant dream.
According to a Palm Beach Post article by Chris Hutchins on June 19, 2000, Masters hired Mason to “design Xanadu, keep costs within the budget and use his media connections for exposure.” Bob’s job was finding an operations manager (Eric Wolter would serve in that role), provide design input and identify a contractor to build the place.
Mason’s original floor-plan called for a 6,000-square-foot cluster of 15 rooms or “pleasure domes.” They also planned expansions with another building and a restaurant which never were constructed. The aforementioned July 9 1983 article in The Orlando Sentinel stated “the 18-room demonstration house” was designed to be “seen, not lived in.”
“Mason had no intention of controlling costs, and he had no intention of being loyal to our vision,” told Masters to Palm Beach Post reporter Hutchins in 2000. “He’d been talking about ‘The Home of the Future’ for 15 years, and he saw this as a way to bring it all to life, at our expense … He took us way over budget.”
How much over budget? Mason’s costs went $225,000 over the original plan. This overage left original investor Hartless scrambling to find more investors as they saw the potential for profit being in the shadow of Disney.
CONSTRUCTION OF XANADU, HOME OF THE FUTURE
By February 11, 1983, construction of Xanadu, Home of the Future was in progress along highway 192. By this time, it was reported the attraction would be a 5,000 square-foot-home which visitors could take a guided tour both in English and other languages. The house was scheduled to open in April 1983 but that date would slip to summer as construction continued.
Xanadu was built by inflating large hemispheric balloons which were sprayed with structural insulation to create the sculpted curves.
“The walls of the 6,000-square-foot Xanadu formed in 10 days by inflating enormous canvas balloons and spraying them from the inside and outside with [polyurethane] foam. Windows, doors and skylights were then carved into the hardened foam.” (The Orlando Sentinel, July 9, 1983)
A September 29, 1983 article in The Stuart News stated the home was built of “solid insulation” and represented “the energy efficient passive solar home of the year 2001.”
Costs for Xanadu ballooned to $400,000 and would contain $250,000 worth electronic equipment.
Interior designs were done by Orlando-based Marcia Farrar Girdley who, “softened the starkness of the plastic walls with cushy furniture – mostly large sectional pieces – upholstered in pastels” (St. Petersburg Times, August 28, 1983).
OPENING OF XANADU, HOME OF THE FUTURE
Xanadu’s construction was rushed for a July 2-3, 1983 opening, most likely to capitalize on the Fourth of July traffic to Central Florida. Masters and team hoped to attract 1,000 visitors a day. The Wisconsin home constructed in 1979 received about 100,000 visitors each summer.
At opening in July 1983, admission was $1.00 for children and $2.75 for adults. The adult fee would be raised to $4.50 once more technology was installed. The attraction operated everyday from 8:00 a.m. to midnight.
By the time I visited in 2000, the building was showing its age. There were cracked windows, part of a spire was missing and the overall home looked dirty. The location had been closed since 1996 and would be demolished in October 2005.
I can only imagine what it was like in the early 1980s. Granted, visitors were disappointed as many of the promised technological items never worked. This must have been an attraction where you needed to use your imagination.
There was a small domed outhouse on the property which contained restrooms. I imagine it would have been easier to facilitate visitor traffic in these restrooms versus using one inside the home.
The greenhouse windows were no longer in tact when I stopped by that early Saturday morning. What I would have given to sit in the greenhouse, enjoying a cup of coffee and dreaming of the 21st Century.
An odd footnote to this story, the same year the home was closed, home designer Roy Mason was brutally murdered in Washington D.C. by someone in a drug-induced rage in 1996. His futuristic dreams would never see 2001 and yet there are so many things predicted in 1983 that are now found in homes today.
Here are a few more looks at this Home of the Future. You can find high resolution images on my Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aloha75/albums/72177720321750135
