This book examines experiences of home improvement in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand, providing valuable insight into the ways in which people make and maintain home in social, material and economic context. Drawing on in-depth interviews, examining both DIY projects and projects carried out by professional handymen, Rosie Cox explores how home improvement fits into wider social relationships and structures of inequality. Consideration is given to the importance of such work for gender and national identities, and how these identities are related to material contexts and the forms and fabric of homes. The book also highlights how home improvement can be a rewarding and valuable form of work, as well as an unrewarding and alienating endeavour. It will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology and human geography.

This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses the significance of books in creating the idea of home. The chapters present cases that reveal the affective and sensory dimensions of books and reading in the practice of everyday life of individuals, in communities, and in society. The complex relationship of books, reading, and home is explored through American and European case studies both in bourgeois and middle-class homes, and in working-class and immigrant families and communities with limited possibilities for reading. The volume combines the conceptions and representations of domesticity, the materiality of reading, and library as a place, drawing on book history and material culture studies as well as anthropology and sociology of the home.

This book shows how international influences profoundly shaped the ‘English’ home of Victorian and Edwardian London; homes which, in turn, influenced Britain’s (and Britons’) place on the world stage. The period between 1850 and 1914 was one of fundamental global change, when London homes were subject to new expanding influences that shaped how residents cleaned, ate, and cared for family. It was also the golden age of domesticity, when the making and maintaining of home expressed people’s experience of society, class, race, and politics. Focusing on the everyday toil of housework, the chapters in this volume show the ‘English’ home as profoundly global conglomeration of people, technology, and things. It examines a broad spectrum of sources, from patents to ice cream makers, and explores domestic histories through original readings and critiques of printed sources, material culture, and visual ephemera.

Sophie Day explores the houses that are imagined, built, repurposed, and dismantled among different communities in Ladakh, drawing attention to the ways in which houses are like and unlike people.A handful of in-depth ‘house portraits’ are selected for the insight they provide into major regional developments, based on the author’s extended engagement since 1981. Most of these houses are Buddhist and associated with the town of Leh. Drawing on both image and text, collaborative methods for assembling material show the intricate relationships between people and places over the life course. Innovative methods for recording and archiving such as ‘storyboards’ are developed to frame different views of the house. This approach raises analytical questions about the composition of life within and beyond storyboards, offering new ways to understand a region that intrigues specialists and non-specialists alike.

This book focuses on the contemporary fired clay brick to explore themes of home and house, homeownership, materiality, and sense of place. It investigates why, despite an increasing number of alternative materials, brick remains at the forefront of what people, in the UK in particular, expect homes to be built of, and how brick is indelibly entwined with what home means – something materially stable and financially secure, affording a located sense of place. Through observation of the building process and interviews with bricklayers, foremen, planners, developers, and homebuyers in England, Felicity Cannell traces the embedded meanings of a mundane, ubiquitous artefact, and reveals the tensions and contradictions in today’s use of brick to signify the traditional home. Although easing the planning process and leading to quick sales, the way brick is used in mass market housing today considerably restricts its capacities, notably decoration, flexibility, and strength: the very qualities which have historically positioned this tremendously versatile material as the superlative building block. Overall, the book adds complexity to the study of home and prompts debate about why we build the way we do.

This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of stuff within them, is increasingly sold as a catch-all solution to the stresses of modern life and the need to reduce our carbon footprint. Shrinking living space is being repackaged in a neoliberal capitalist context as a lifestyle choice rather than the consequence of diminishing choice in the face of what has become a long-term housing ‘crisis’. What does this mean for how we live in the long term, and is there a dark side to the promise of a simpler, more sustainable home life? Shrinking Domesticities brings together research from across the social sciences, planning and architecture to explore these issues. From co-living developments to the Tiny House Movement, self-storage units to practices of ‘de-stuffification’, and drawing on examples from across Europe, North America and Australasia, the authors of this volume seek to understand both what micro-living is bringing to our societies, and what it may be eroding

Designing Homeliness: Everyday Practices of Care proposes an interdisciplinary lens to investigate home. The book situates homeliness as a continual process of creating, maintaining, and restoring meanings and experiences of home. Melisa Duque draws from her design ethnographic practice with people using smart home lighting, gardening, jigsaw puzzles, and op-shopping to present everyday examples in dialogue with theoretical discussions, revealing the role of homeliness in generating wellbeing. The research projects featured in this book were conducted in rural, regional, remote, and metropolitan areas in Australia, at familiar and unfamiliar living sites, including people’s homes, a mental health hospital unit, a residential aged care facility, and a charity shop revaluing domestic things. This book offers conceptualisations and practical tools to advance home studies while engaging with broader discussions on ageing, wellbeing, and sustainability. Led by design research and social science analysis, this book will be of value for students, researchers, and practitioners at these intersections, including design, anthropology, and human geography.