Dwelling Together: Aesthetic Practice in the Family Home

Abstract

Home design and decoration have risen to prominence in popular culture and as areas of professional expertise, but furnishing one’s abode is an ancient practice which invites not only aesthetic analysis, but also warrants serious sociological attention. This study provides such attention in the context of family life, revealing how designing, decorating, and living at home are so intimately interwoven with family relationships that they are in fact constitutive of family as a lived social form. Family members produce the idea and experience of family, in part, with and through material activities like decorating.

Through in-depth interviews with sixteen individuals and ethnographic analysis of their home decorating activities, this study reveals the diversity of ways in which people accomplish this work in practice, and furnishes also the theoretical and ontological foundation necessary to understand how an experienced ideological form like “the family” depends upon material and aesthetic practices.