My family and I arrived at Disneyland on a hot June day. We had spent the preceding two hours stuck in traffic on an un-super Interstate 5, idling away $4.35 gasoline in a rental car that was no one’s idea of a dream. Autopia did not appeal.

But one part of moldy old Tomorrowland wasn’t past its sell-by date. A freshly minted house of the future had had its ribbon-cutting—with laser scissors?—earlier that month. These digs were completely original and all brand (specifically: Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Life|ware) new. Also new is the name, “The Innoventions Dream Home,” but typing that even once has proved traumatic, so I will henceforth refer to it simply as HoF II.

My wife took our younger children, Poppet and Buster, “to infinity and beyond” (Buzz Lightyear being integral to the classic future’s canon). And I led my 10-year-old daughter, Muffin, to utopia’s latest abode.

Muffin asked where we were going. I told her and she said, “So it’s really, really, really modern?” It was more modern than that. HoF II has a subprime mortgage, or so it appears. The joint was closed up.

“Technical difficulties,” said a Disney “cast member.”

I invoked what media privileges I have and called Disney public relations. John McClintock, a senior publicist, could not have been more polite and understanding. He did what he could to get my daughter and me a walk-through and a look-around. That was all you got with the old House of the Future anyway, although HoF II comes with performers portraying a future family (which still has one mom and one dad, amazingly enough).

McClintock called back. “Technical difficulties,” he said, plus a firm no-go from his higher-ups.

Muffin and I could do no more than look over a railing into the ceiling-free household one floor below us. It has a single-story open plan with a circular shape, though the circularity seems to have more to do with the preexisting shape of the building and with crowd control than with futurism. Not that there were any crowds trying to get in. As far as I could tell, nobody but Muffin and me noticed that HoF II wasn’t open.

I hoisted Muffin so she could get a better view. “It looks like our hotel,” she said. Not even. And where we were staying is best described as “Schlitz-Carlton.”

According to Disney, the shape of things to come can be found at Pottery Barn, with a quick stop in Restoration Hardware for “classic future” touches and a trip to Target to get throw rugs and cheap Japanese paper lanterns. HoF II was designed by the Taylor Morrison company, a home builder specializing in anodyne subdevelopmental housing in the Southwest. The company’s president and CEO told the Associated Press, “The 1950s home didn’t look like anything, anywhere. It was space-age and kind of cold. We didn’t want the home to intimidate the visitors.”