Living Rooms

The places where we live promise refuge from the brutality of life within capitalist society. Yet in our bloated property market, houses have become an asset first and a home second. For a few, the home is a sanctuary and a safe investment. For many others, a place of precarity, discomfort and financial insecurity. Living Rooms invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying economic reality. Through an examination of a series of familiar house hold objects, it provides the blueprint for a utopian idea of the home, one that is made to cultivate and nourish life rather than seeing it as a threat to financial value. Living Rooms is radical and elegiac, expansive in its conceptual and emotional range. Johnson-Schlee deftly blends history, memoir, theory, and wide-ranging cultural critique - moving between the colonial history of house plants, Proustian reminiscence of summers spent at his grandparent's bungalo, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?

The places where we live promise refuge from the brutality of life within capitalist society. Yet in our bloated property market, houses have become an asset first and a home second. For a few, the home is a sanctuary and a safe investment. For many others, a place of precarity, discomfort and financial insecurity. Living Rooms invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying economic reality. Through an examination of a series of familiar house hold objects, it provides the blueprint for a utopian idea of the home, one that is made to cultivate and nourish life rather than seeing it as a threat to financial value. Living Rooms is radical and elegiac, expansive in its conceptual and emotional range. Johnson-Schlee deftly blends history, memoir, theory, and wide-ranging cultural critique - moving between the colonial history of house plants, Proustian reminiscence of summers spent at his grandparent's bungalo, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?