Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410180027
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA KELLY BROWN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The neighborhood suspected Driver Wayne was smoking strange substances.
Now I believe that house probably existed; the homeowner was just a futurist like the ones furniture industry analyst Jerry Epperson met at a conference in Cambridge, Mass.
What Epperson heard inspired him to create his largest, and boldest, annual report of the industry he's been watching for years, "The Future Home."
The report's futurisms list describes everything from the chips we will carry in our bodies to replace the need for passports to the keyless homes we will live in, where controls respond to our voices.
The important thing to Epperson, however, is that as a society we will turn more toward home.
"There is no need to fight crime and pollute the air with cars to be in an office tower with other people," Epperson said recently from the Richmond office of Mann, Armistead & Epperson Ltd.
Yes, he still goes to the office.
With telephones and fax machines, he can work at home, but he doesn't have access to his files and his colleagues.
"In the new home I'm building, I'm going to have an office for me and my assistant," Epperson said. That still won't replace an office at the office, but will mean going into Richmond less often.
It is predicted that by 2025, 60 percent of those currently holding office jobs will telecommute from a home office/study center. We also will work fewer hours.
But the future doesn't just include a rearrangement of work habits. Epperson envisions computer-televisions that allow three family members to watch one machine and each get a different program that the others can't see. The home computer will prepare a review of the day's news and keep up with the shopping list for toiletries. It will both weigh and wake its owner.
In the future, the house also might travel with you when you relocate. The portable houses won't be like today's mobile homes, but can be dismantled and reconstructed.
No, it's not all realistic yet, but we need to start thinking about this new world. That's Epperson's goal with the report - to stimulate the thinking of furniture makers.
In the 1970s, while at Scott & Stringfellow Inc., Epperson began accumulating data on the residential furniture industry and selling research reports. He expanded the database after joining Wheat First Butcher Singer in 1976. From then until 1990, Epperson published a Home Furnishings Compendium that Forbes Magazine called the "bible of the furniture industry."
In 1991, Epperson and several colleagues left Wheat and formed their current firm, which is affiliated with Interstate/Johnson Lane regional brokerage firm in Charlotte, N.C.
In addition to offering investment banking services, the firm supplies the furniture industry with research in the form of monthly digests and annual reports, like "Future Home."
Much of what his reports look at is economics. This latest one, for instance, notes that annual growth projections made during the spring International Home Furnishings Market might have been too bright.
Epperson had worried that the 9.4 percent growth he forecast for the industry in the spring was too low by 2 percent. Now, he says it was too high by almost that much.
The outlook is still good, though, he notes on the eve of the fall wholesale market in High Point, N.C. The growth is good enough to inspire manufacturers to take risks, and that generally benefits consumers, he said.
At the fall 1994 market, these risks might be no more than the introduction of larger collections of furniture. But it gets the industry in the mood for the day when customized home furnishings could include a baby's room with wallpaper featuring the mother's face, chairs and sofas with the same ergonomic designs now used for office furniture and a toilet for the dog.
by CNB