What is home?

A place to sleep each night, sure. But it’s also a feeling, a memory, a longing. Part 1 of 4 in a series exploring the meaning of ‘home’.

For some, home is a fixed point. For others, it’s elusive, an ideal that never quite settles.

I moved around a lot as a kid. Reflecting on it now, I think that’s part of what drew me to interior design. The experience of inhabiting many houses meant I could keep a tally of what felt right and what didn’t. Unconsciously accumulating intel for an unknown point in the future.

I recently finished reading Deborah Levy’s living memoir trilogy, which culminates in the final book, Real Estate. Aside from being obsessed with her style of prose, this book, in particular, has really stuck with me. In it, she writes about her imagined ‘unreal estate’, a house of her dreams that doesn’t exist. A house, for her, is not just bricks and mortar but a site of self, somewhere a person can fully inhabit their contradictions. It’s not so much the acquisition of property, but the claiming of space literally and psychologically. It also reminded me of a game I used to play when I couldn’t get to sleep as a 10-year-old. I would imagine, in minute detail, my own dream house – or in Levy’s words, my ‘unreal estate’. I would pick and choose my favourite parts of the houses we had lived in and friends’ places I’d visited. In my mind, I conjured grand staircases and cosy nooks, and would inevitably fall asleep before moving through every possible room and hallway.

Similarly, in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard considers home as a container for the daydream. (And a lovely reference in Levy’s Real Estate). Bachelard extols that our homes are vessels of idleness and imagination. A home isn’t just where we sleep, it’s where we project ourselves, where memories layer in the banality of life’s tasks and rituals. The corner cupboard full of appliances that never get used, a favourite chair where the sun comes in – each is personal and holds a kind of intimacy that transcends function.

And yet, shelter is one of our most basic needs. At its core, a home is protection: from inclement weather, yes, but also from the gaze of the world. It’s human nature to beautify our environments. We decorate and curate, folding each worn linen sheet and book on the shelf into our identity. We light candles. We frame photographs. We paint the walls in colours that feel uniquely expressive.

The irony is, while we strive to make homes feel permanent, they rarely are. Homes, like life, are always in a constant state of flux – a work in progress. And perhaps that’s the point. Homes are something we construct, not only in a physical sense, but through our indivdual agglomeration of memory and meaning.

As a topic that has seemingly been bobbing around in my head for decades, I would love to know what others think.

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I’m a design journalist – once an interior designer (for a hot second), then a magazine editor, now a solopreneur and podcast host. I write here to explore the nuances of creative work beyond the algorithm.

I also work with select clients – find me at aleeshacallahan.com.