Abstract
The home constitutes one of the most important realms in modern everyday life and to an extent hitherto unforeseen we engage deeply with our homes, talking about them, decorating them, rebuilding them, designing them - as lifestyle magazines and television programmes attest to. But what makes a dwelling a home, and how do people evaluate and choose their ideal domestic dwelling spaces? This paper focuses on the modern home as a dwelling-space in Denmark. Moving away from a purely economist conceptualisation of home-making and home ownership, the paper seeks to analyse the modern home as a space encompassing socio-material and temporal processes that make up everyday lives and spaces. It is argued that the concept of dwelling is particularly salient for an understanding of the relationship between materiality and sociality: Domestic architecture communicates meaning, and individuals attach meaning to their dwelling space through engagements. Hence, by acting, evaluating and choosing, individuals give information on the ways in which dwellings are used, shaped and reshaped, and on how a dwelling becomes a home. Using survey material and interviews, the paper seeks to arrive at an understanding of how the modern home may be perceived as a taskscape making associations between features of the environment and features of the social; in other words, preferences expressing the continuous using, shaping and altering of the dwelling so as to encompass personal and cultural ideals about 'the good modern life'. The paper then seeks to illuminate how this varies over life stages, arguing for a dynamic conceptualisation of dwelling and home.