Investing in Enchantment: Memory, Market, and the Family Vacation Home

by Michelle Janning

Overview

Should we keep the family cabin or list it on Airbnb? U.S. second homes are formally classified as investment properties used primarily for financial gain or vacation homes primarily reserved for personal use, but what have families actually been doing with them before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns?

Today’s desire for authenticity and family connectedness has made family vacation homes a compelling site to examine how we think of labor and leisure, whom we include as family members and neighbors, and how all of this is represented both spatially and materially. Framed as a magical place for family members to look back on nostalgically, the family vacation home remains an enchanted and memory-filled site that is artificially removed from the marketplace, even if it is rented to others for their family vacations. It is meant to be a magical escape from the challenges of work and family stress, politics, and social inequalities. In reality, the family vacation home requires labor, has financial value as a piece of family wealth, and the magic is not accessible to all. In Investing in Enchantment, Michelle Janning tells a new story about the cultural meanings and structural outcomes surrounding family vacation homes today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538182680
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/23/2024
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology and Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences at Whitman College. Her research focuses on the sociology of families, with emphasis on the material and spatial dimensions of family life. A frequent speaker and commentator in news media about contemporary families and home design, her books include The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), and A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers (Routledge, 2023).

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating look at vacation homes and the owners and industry behind them. Dr.Janning insightfully explores how owners navigate attachments, nostalgia, communities, inequalities, and boundaries around the places, spaces and objects of second homes. Perfect for a college classroom, or your next vacation reading!

Arielle Kuperberg

In this comprehensive and sympathetic study, Michelle Janning untangles the twisted skeins of enchantment and authenticity, of magic and realism, that underlie the complexities of vacation homes. With an acute eye for contradiction and irony, Janning gently reveals the subtle paradoxes and silent compromises people make in pursuit of the enchanted vacation home, and along the way asks powerful questions about how people know they belong, what it means to be a good neighbor, and what their dreams of the future mean for the meanings of the present.

Allison Pugh