This is a history of domestic space in Canada. Peter Ward looks at how spaces in the Canadian home have changed over the last three centuries, and how family and social relationships have shaped – and been shaped by – these changing spaces. A fundamental element of daily life for individuals and families is domestic privacy, that of individuals and that of the family or household. There are also two facets of privacy – privacy from and privacy to. Personal privacy sets the individual apart from the group, creating opportunities for seclusion. Family privacy draws boundaries between the household and the community, defending the solidarity of the home and providing a basis for family relationships. In both ways, privacy is intimately involved with the history of the house. Over time, the changing size, shape, and location of the home have created widely different opportunities for family and personal privacy. Together with major shifts in household composition, family size, and domestic technology, they have gradually altered the conditions of everyday domestic life. But the pattern of change has been far from uniform, for the nature, meaning, and experience of privacy in Canadian have varied widely over the past 300 years. This book explores some of those experiences and meanings, reflecting on their impllications for family and social life historically as well as in the recent past.

Tune in to HGTV, visit your local bookstore's magazine section, or flip to the 'Homes' section of your weekend newspaper, and it becomes clear: domestic spaces play an immense role in our cultural consciousness. The Domestic Space Reader addresses our collective fascination with houses and homes by providing the first comprehensive survey of the concept across time, cultures, and disciplines. This pioneering anthology, which is ideal for students and general readers, features writing by key scholars, thinkers, and writers including Gaston Bachelard, Mary Douglas, Le Corbusier, Homi Bhabha, Henri Lefebvre, Mrs. Beeton, Ma Thanegi, Diana Fuss, Beatriz Colomina, and Edith Wharton. Among the many engaging topics explored are: the impact of domestic technologies on family life; the relationship between religion and the home; nomadic peoples and housing; domestic spaces in art and literature; and the history of the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The Domestic Space Reader demonstrates how discussions of domestic spaces can help us better understand our inner lives and challenge our perceptions of life in particular times and places.

Explores the wider cultural framework in which we should study the housing in the Greek and Roman worlds.

This volume takes forward the debate about 19th-century domestic space, drawing on economic history and literary criticism. To date, studies of 19th-century domestic space have discussed a feminized, middle class sphere, often using domestic guides and fictional representations of domesticity to generate their arguments.

Covering major theoretical and methodological developments over recent decades in areas like social institutions, settlement types, gender, status, and power, this book addresses the developing understanding of where and how people in the past created and used domestic space. It will be a useful synthesis for scholars and an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in archaeology and architecture.

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture. Questions about meanings of ‘home’ and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about ‘home’: the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural history and cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; ‘media home’ imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of ‘homes of tomorrow’ and digital smart homes. A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies.