Homeliness

Definition

Homeliness names the familial-ideological quality households want their homes to project: "homeliness, warmth and a welcoming feel." In Madigan & Munro's interviews, when respondents were "asked to describe what impression they hoped other people would have of their home, typically… they expressed notions connected to familial ideology – homeliness, warmth and a welcoming feel" (p. 223) — Mrs G: "That you can come in at any time, it's nice and homely"; Mrs R: "You can come in and feel at ease, they don't have to feel that they have to watch what they are doing" (p. 224). The concept is the popular ideal of 'home' as a social-relational achievement rather than a designed style: its content is hospitality ("you can come in at any time"), ease ("feel at ease… they don't have to feel that they have to watch what they are doing") and the relaxation of formal show — the home as "a relaxed 'back-region' where material wealth and show is much less important than the human relationships sustained" (p. 224). In the editors' headnote, homeliness is the positive content that replaces style: "Occupiers tended to reflect notions of homeliness, warmth and welcoming, in which consumer decisions are driven by use-value over style." Homeliness is thus what the household offers where taste culture offers style — an interior judged not by its look but by what visitors can be made to feel in it.

Key Thinkers

• Ruth Madigan & Moira Munro — the concept's empirical source (1996/2006): homeliness/warmth/welcoming as the familial-ideology criterion offered instead of style (pp. 223–224); its back-region basis in their previous privacy work (p. 224); the plush-and-plush "comfort, luxury and indulgence" of the popular ideal of 'home' (p. 222).
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who place homeliness at the headnote's centre: "Occupiers tended to reflect notions of homeliness, warmth and welcoming" (p. 221).
• Jean Baudrillard — the system-level counterpoint: Baudrillard's "atmospheric values" include signified warmth (the calculated 'warm' interior of The System of Objects) — homeliness as a value that sign-systems manufacture, or so the sign-theory would claim (see atmospheric-values).

Related Concepts

• comfort — homeliness's bodily component: comfort, luxury and indulgence "important to many people's ideal of 'home'" (p. 222); and its tension with respectability's cleanliness standard (p. 225).
• domestic-interior — the concept's site: the home as familial-ideological space, its appearance subordinated to "the human relationships sustained" (p. 224).
• respectability — homeliness's rival: the tension "between the notion of home as a place in which to relax and the recognition that the home may also be revealing about the household" (p. 224) is the homeliness/respectability negotiation.
• privacy — the back-region thesis: homeliness is the public face of the relaxed private realm where show matters less than human relationships (p. 224).
• taste — what homeliness replaces in the judgment of the home: 'good design is not a condition of good taste' (editors), because the operative ideal is not taste but welcoming-ness.
• interior-as-biography — homeliness's self-presentation form: the home as "an important expression of identity, yet… an identity which is only partially achieved through appearances" (p. 224) — the identity expressed is relational, not aesthetic.
• habitus — the frame for homeliness's constitution: familial ideology perceived and constructed in the surroundings (p. 226).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the concept's founding source: "typically respondents expressed notions connected to familial ideology – homeliness, warmth and a welcoming feel" (p. 223); Mrs G — "That you can come in at any time, it's nice and homely"; Mrs R — "You can come in and feel at ease, they don't have to feel that they have to watch what they are doing" (p. 224); the back-region basis ("a relaxed 'back-region' where material wealth and show is much less important than the human relationships sustained," p. 224); and the plush furnishing that "imparts a feeling of comfort, luxury and indulgence which is important to many people's ideal of 'home'" (p. 222).
• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the concept's aesthetic-theoretical upgrade: homeliness's felt qualities elevated into an aesthetic criterion. "the attractiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability. The Glass House lacks what we judge today as livability: comfort, casualness, and a certain degree of dowdy familiarity" (p. 229); and the home-feeling named as the Glass House's deficit: "one can never feel truly at home" (p. 229). The dowdy — the concept's anti-stylish staple ("a dumpy room, where the dusty couch invites slouching," pp. 231–232) — is thereby claimed as part of the interior's beauty, not its failure: where Madigan & Munro's respondents prefer homeliness to style, Melchionne makes the preference aesthetic. The chapter's completion of the concept: the art of living that sustains the welcoming interior is an art — "what any sensitive homemaker creates" (p. 230). See comfort, art-of-domesticity, tidying.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the concept's territorial deepening: homeliness's felt qualities re-theorized as the home-territory's expressive effect — portable as feel rather than as furnishing: "might rid oneself of all one's possessions each time one moves, but might recreate a similar space, a similar home, with a similar feel (a sense of light, of leisure, of tension) in the next place, drawing around oneself an expressive space from a variety of markers and milieus" (p. 393) — the "feel" as what the welcoming interior is, recreated from new markers at each move; and the home-feeling named as the unpacking's terminus: "Home is the feeling that comes when the final objects are unpacked and arranged and the space seems complete (or even when one stares at unpacked boxes imagining)" (pp. 393–394). Where Madigan & Munro's homeliness is relational (what visitors feel) and Melchionne's is aesthetic (perceived livability), Wise's is territorial: homeliness as what the accretion of milieu effects expresses — "the way of inhabiting it that made it a home" (Boym quoted p. 394). See home, comfort.

Open Questions

• Is homeliness the popular register of what the designer tradition calls comfort? De Wolfe's occupant-centred rooms, Baldwin's "room with a heart," the Beechers' domestic happiness — do they all specify homeliness in the vocabulary of class position, with Madigan & Munro's respondents naming the same ideal without the design discourse? See comfort, sterility-of-perfection.
• Homeliness is defined negatively against show ("material wealth and show is much less important," p. 224): is the welcoming interior then the anti-display interior — and can it be designed at all, or is it an achievement of the social relations ('etiquette') the essay says matter more than furnishings? See domestic-interior, privacy.
• Baudrillard's sign-system analysis reads warmth as an "atmospheric value" — signified warmth, calculated cosiness. Madigan & Munro's respondents mean warmth relationally ("come in and feel at ease"). Is homeliness the interior quality that resists commodification (it cannot be bought, only hosted), or does the plush "comfort, luxury and indulgence" (p. 222) show its commercial simulation already at work in mass-market taste? See atmospheric-values, consumerism.
• The editors' headnote pairs homeliness with use-value over style: is homeliness therefore a class position within taste (the Bourdieu question), or a different axis of the home's judgment altogether — relational rather than classificatory? See respectability, taste.