Cultural Ideals of Home: The Social Dynamics of Domestic Space

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 addr...