If you’re doing your part and social distancing from inside your home, you may start to notice small details of your house or apartment you hadn’t thought about before—like why your older home doesn’t have a closet, or how white subway tile became so ubiquitous. You may also be wondering if there’s anything you can do—aside from the usual cleaning and disinfecting process—to help keep your home as virus-free as possible during the coronavirus outbreak.
Whether you realize it or not, a number of the design features in our homes today originated, or were popularized, because of previous infectious disease outbreaks, like the 1918 flu pandemic, tuberculosis, and dysentery. There is a very long, very interesting history of the intersection of health, architecture, and design going back to ancient times, but we’re going to skip ahead to the late 19th and early 20th centuries to focus on architectural and design features you could potentially find in your home today. Here are a few examples of home design elements tied to attempts to prevent or slow the spread of infectious disease.
