A Love Letter to “Home: A Short History of an Idea,” the Book That Defined My Idea of Comfort

This essay is part of a collection of love letters celebrating personal design obsessions.

A time-honored tradition in my childhood home was, for some reason, fighting with my sister over sections of the Sunday edition of The New York Times. The magazine was by far the most desirable, especially if it was the biannual fashion or design issue—but a close second was the Television section, a standalone periodical that ceased existence in 2006, but was a staple of my childhood. Cruising through the section was a suitable enough way to make up for the fact that we didn’t have cable, but the memory that’s stuck with me decades later isn’t the TV listings or critics notes—it’s the full page ad space on the back of the magazine itself, generally occupied by luxury and high-end contemporary furniture brands like Roche Bobois and Maurice Villency.

In these ads, well-heeled and relatively fancy white people lounged in and around large, expensive sofas, chairs, and beds, situated in spaces that conveyed a cosmopolitan elegance, even to my untrained eye. What these ads were selling was obviously the furniture, but beyond that, an idea inextricably tied to leisure: comfort. Enjoy Frasier from the warm embrace of a Natuzzi Italia sectional sofa and bask in the spoils afforded to you by your upper-class life. These brief glimpses of interiors looked and felt luxurious—a well-appointed loft that was markedly different from the home I lived in at the time. Because I was an impressionable youth, something about these studied images have stuck with me, serving as the driving force behind what I feel makes a house a home. A beautifully decorated interior is not enough—it has to be comfortable.

This notion—that comfort is paramount in making a space feel like home—is explored in full detail in Witold Rybczynski’s Home: A Short History of an Idea, a book I first encountered in the depths of my father’s office, and read, cover to cover, as a pretentious young person with a passing interest in interiors. For as long as I can remember, the idea of home has fascinated me—it’s much more interesting to see how people live, more so than what they do to make money or what they eat when they’re hungover. Though it’s been years since I’ve read it, a recent revisit reminded me of its quiet genius. Rybczynski, himself an architect and professor of urbanism, sets out to explore the idea of home by interrogating what "comfort" means, and does so by tracing that particular idea through history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary times (1986, which is when this book was published), demonstrating how our notions of the concept have evolved. Really unpacking all of the ideas presented in its pages would take away from the pleasure of reading the book in the first place, but the general takeaway is this: comfort as we know it is a relatively new invention, and for much of history, homes were not designed with "conventional notions of comfort" in mind. In fact, many of the things Rybczynski learned in architecture school and beyond seemed to directly contradict the concept.

The book traces the history of the idea by time period, starting in the Middle Ages when houses were multipurpose spaces dedicated purely to function, to the aforementioned contemporary times, where, in 1986, houses had evolved to be expressions of the desires and aesthetics of their architects, interior designers, and homeowners. Each chapter further examines how the idea of comfort was shaped and thereon influenced by concepts like domesticity, ease, and efficiency, relating those cultural shifts to developments in architecture and design. Revisiting the book, I realized that so much of my personal taste was defined by it, especially in the chapters that focus on how furniture evolved to consider function and form at the same time. For some, a Regency-era chaise lounge is a fussy and overly decorative piece of furniture, but for me, it is perfect: a chair with a purpose, a bit of humor, and more importantly, a sense of drama, is much more useful than a chair that takes itself too seriously.

Consider the Wassily chair, one of a handful of classic modern furniture pieces that are instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in design. Marcel Breuer’s groundbreaking tubular steel design has stood the test of time, even though it is extremely representative of its era—absent any decoration or flourishes, the chair’s beauty is in its simplicity. But, Rybczynski argues, the chair itself isn’t that comfortable to sit in for longer than 30 minutes at a time. He makes a similar case about other modern design classics—that comfort is an afterthought, or, rather, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind, writing: "The people slumped in a Barcelona chair, or struggling to get out of an Eames lounge chair, do not feel comfortable, they are simply willing to put up with discomfort in the name of art—or prestige—which is not the same thing."

Today, as a Dwell editor, I see contemporary furniture and architecture of the sort every day, designed with an eye toward the new and the undiscovered. Though I can appreciate the beauty of an iconic chair and understand its significance to contemporary design, what Rybczynski suggests in the book mirrors much of my own thinking when it comes to furniture, spaces, and aesthetics: If it looks better than it feels, then it’s not worth my time or money. A La-Z-Boy recliner is arguably hideous, but extraordinarily comfortable; if faced with the choice between that and a complicated metal item that I can’t quite figure out how to sit in, I’m going with the former, every time. Life is difficult enough as is, so why should my furniture be, too?

Without even thinking about it, Rybczynski’s intellectual pursuit of comfort has mirrored mine in my adult life—or, mine his. The interiors I prefer are rumpled, cozy, and lived-in. The feeling I strive for when thinking about what constitutes comfort is that of a parent’s house: cable television, snacks, and a couch so plush that I can drag my essentials to it in the morning and make a nest from which to rot in quiet ecstasy. The spare minimalism of a modern home with all its sharp angles and expansive glazing photographs well for the pages of a magazine, but what an interior really needs to be comfortable is any sign of life. For Rybczynski, and also for me, the little details of a lived life—shoes by the door, a pile of papers in the kitchen, a throw blanket left on the sofa and not folded and tucked away—are what actually make a home.  

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Top photo by Gunnar Knechtel of architect Benedetta Tagliabue’s Barcelona flat; originally published in "Arch Support" from Dwell’s February 2012 issue

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