​THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME: SUBURBAN RHETORIC AND REALITY AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Year 2019, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 63 - 76, 01.04.2019

Ellen Avıtts

Abstract

My study is about presentations of lifestyle in house merchandising and the extent of human agency in shaping home. It seeks to answer a significant, but not often addressed, question: To what degree and in what ways does the home-dweller conform to or move away from prescribed ways of living? My focus is late twentieth and early twenty-first century middle-class, single-family housing built by speculative developers, the most common form of dwelling in the United States. Between 1998 and 2004 I conducted field-work analysis of the walk-through model home and its accompanying literature. I explored house marketing techniques to clarify how these spaces and the objects placed in them are used as symbols of social identity and the ways in which artifacts shape, and are shaped by, communally driven perceptions of middle-class values. I also examined the hierarchical division of domestic space and the gendering of spaces in the constructed spectacle of the walk-through furnished model home. My study was also a consideration of ways in which these staged spaces support culturally perceived norms while denying actual social, cultural, and economic realities.This paper builds on my earlier work by considering the ways families negotiate the space in which they live. Based on ethnographic field-work and oral histories of persons now living in the homes analyzed in my initial research, I have constructed a comparative analysis of the house as commodity and the house as lived experience that reveals how home-dwellers utilize space in their practices of everyday living and how these practices ascribe to or challenge overarching ideas of domesticity and ideas of life in the home as presented in house merchandising material. Through case studies, this paper explores the relationship between ideal and real lives as articulated in middle-class, single-family dwellings of the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century

Keywords

Architecture, housing, suburbs, merchandising, domestic spaceword count - 7985

References

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• Anonymous Judd Developers Salesperson. (1998). Interviewed by Ellen Avitts. March.
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• Captions of Visual Material (All photos by author)
• Figure 1. Williamsburg Grand Model Home
• Figure 2. Judd Builders/Developers Promotional Brochure (two images)
• Figure 3. Floorplan, Williamsburg Grand Figure 4. Formal Living Room, Williamsburg Grand
• Figure 5. Dining Room, Williamsburg Grand, from Formal Living Room (two images)
• Figure 6. Informal Spaces, Williamsburg Grand (two images)
• Figure 7. Sunroom, Williamsburg Grand (three images)
• Figure 8. Formal Dining Room, Family Two Figure 9. Formal Living Room, Family Two Figure 10. Formal Living Room, Family One
• Figure 11. Family Room, Family One
• Figure 12. Home Office, Family One and Model Home Office (two images)