Why home is more than a roof over our heads
What is home? It’s a question constantly in my mind, as I watch with horror the events unfolding in Ukraine. Millions of innocent people now displaced from their own homes... homes where they felt safe and comfortable but now they are lost in mass transit across Europe.
Obviously, we hope in time they can go back to their roots and rekindle the life they had.
These tragic events have certainly heightened the concept of home with me. As an architect, the majority of my projects are residential, trying to create homes with a real sense of place and belonging, out of humble bricks and mortar. Translating the physical needs of shelter into places that people can call “home”.
A home is a place of refuge. A person’s most personal belongings are kept in a home and it is where a person feels safe and accepted.
A home tells a story and expresses a person’s or family’s interests and to create a home requires an emotional connection and sense of belonging, not physical things.
The physical home is a space used as a residence for one or many humans. Homes provide sheltered spaces for instance rooms where domestic activity can be performed such as sleeping, preparing food, eating and bathing, as well as providing spaces for working and leisure.
The concept of “home” has been researched and theorised across disciplines – topics ranging from the idea of home, the interior, the psyche, liminal space, contested space to gender and politics.
The home as a concept expands beyond residence as contemporary lifestyles and technological advances redefine the way the global population lives and works.
A home is generally a place that is close to the heart of the owner and can become a prized possession. It has been argued that psychologically, the strongest sense of home commonly coincides geographically with a dwelling.
Usually, the sense of home attenuates as one moves away from that point but it does not do so in a fixed or regular way.
Since it can be said that humans are generally creatures of habit, the state of a person’s home has been known to physiologically influence their behaviour and mental health.
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, adopted in 1948, contains the following text regarding housing and quality of living: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”
How we are reminded of this at the present time.
We often talk about “home is where the heart is”; a place you feel connected to emotionally; a place you are happy to arrive back at; somewhere you have lots of fond memories of.
We talk of simple pleasures, highlighted in a recent Ideal Home magazine feature on things that make a house a home, including the joy of sleeping in your own bed, family photos, your own spot on the sofa, the memories made in this place, a fridge full of food, your books on our bookshelf and natural light.
These spaces evolve when we focus on what makes us happy. When we create a place that meets our needs and expresses our character, we enrich our lives.
Let us now think about those displaced people across the world, and hope that in time, they can return to their place called home.