What's happening to the American home?

It was one of those "click" moments for journalist Maggie Jackson.

As she was putting her two young daughters to bed one evening, their usual leisurely routine of stories and hugs stretched on and on. Mindful of a looming deadline, Ms. Jackson found herself uncharacteristically impatient. "Go to bed," she snapped. "Mommy has to finish her work."

Like millions of other Americans, Jackson uses the family home as a second workplace. A laptop, a fax machine, and papers spread out on the dining-room table in the evening give her Manhattan apartment the temporary look and convenience of an office. But work, she realized that night, was invading their home.

That "click" of recognition led Jackson to ask a central question: What is home in the 21st century as the technological devices that liberate workers from the office shackle them to their jobs at home, encroaching on private space and family time?

The question stands at the heart of her new book, "What's Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life, and Refuge in the Information Age" (Sorin Books, $19.95). In it she argues that traditional notions of home as a place of comfort and retreat are being threatened by a "work-centric" culture.

"Home has become redefined as a base camp for living, a work-based place where you survive, but perhaps don't have very much time for intimate relations or reflection or just thinking time," Jackson says. She likens home to a railroad station, a place where busy family members are always coming and going.

Without a real sense of home, she cautions, people begin to live lives of rootlessness. "We need anchors," she adds.

Jackson is one of a scattering of authors, architects, and social observers who see signs of a hunger for rethinking the idea of home.

That hunger and reexamination were under way before Sept. 11. But they have intensified since then as people seek refuge and stronger family ties. In the wake of that tragedy, she has observed "a raw battle" between the need to work harder and the wish to enjoy life and home.

Hearth-watchers see three trends affecting the 21st-century sense of home. In addition to the Age of Technology, which brings the workplace into the domestic sphere, this is the Age of Accumulation. Surrounded by a surfeit of stuff, time-short Americans risk becoming prisoners of their possessions, bound by the time-consuming need to clean and care for them.

This is also the Age of Bigness. Since 1985, the size of American houses has increased 24 percent, averaging 2,080 square feet. For new homes, the average size is 2,200 square feet. Ironically, the larger sizes come at a time when families are smaller. Americans also spend less time at home and have fewer leisure hours.

Over the centuries, people have always worked at home. "If you looked at Europeans in the 19th century, most professionals literally lived above the workplace," says Witold Rybczynski, who has written extensively about housing. "The bank was on the ground floor."

But at least the 19th-century banker didn't get up at 3 a.m. to check his e-mail or draft a memo on his laptop. Nor did he need to carve out space for a home office and buy special furniture for computers and faxes.

Americans now spend an estimated $3 billion a year on home-office furnishings, according to Gary James, editor of SoHo Today, a trade publication covering the home-office market.

Today's work-oriented culture, linking office and home, also leaves families with little time to cook, clean, and keep clutter under control. That leads to what Jackson calls "outsourcing domesticity" – hiring a battalion of cleaners, gardeners, home organizers, and delivery services.

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