This is the text of the first in a short series about the pursuit of comfort in the home for ‘Blueprint for Living’. It aired on 6th September 2024 and you can hear it here.

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Home is such an evocative word. It’s a concept as much as an actual place, a feeling, an ideal. Coming home is the phrase we use to describe the warmth of encountering something new that seems somehow familiar and reassuring. And home, in its simplest interpretation, for those of us lucky enough to have one, is a physical space. Whether it’s a single room or a many-chambered mansion, it’s not just a shelter from the elements, nor simply where we eat and sleep, it’s the place where we can be ourselves, a retreat from the outside world. The place only we have a key to. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard talked about home being the setting for our emotional development and that it was important to have spaces in which to dream. Woven through this idea of home is another word, comfort. It’s equally loaded. Where the idea of home has been a constant through history, the idea of comfort is a relatively recent one. Until the end of the eighteenth century, comfort was all about support, as in making a comfortable living. To be comfortable was to be well off. But gradually the idea of comfort came to mean something more tangible, incorporating softness, practicality and beauty. It was about personal space and personal expression.

There’s never been a period when so many people have lived so comfortably in practical terms. Our homes are heated or cooled as we want, our bathrooms and kitchens function as they should, our beds and sofas coddle us. Our furnishings may even spark joy. But comfort is more than a plush sofa or a warm room on a cold night although everyone’s understanding of comfort is different. William Morris’s famous maxim that you ‘have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’ is really a call for comfort. Because when the eye is pleased, the soul is comforted.

This idea of comfort in the home grew as society became more layered, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. A new middle class had aspirations they could afford to indulge. Engineering and technical advancements meant things could be done differently and would lead to new innovations like washing machines and stoves. By the twentieth century, our expectation of comfort in the home was all about making life easier. The hard wooden bench of the fifteenth century had become the easy chair of the twentieth, something that cocooned us and helped us feel relaxed. Although there were occasional blips, such as architect Le Corbusier calling the house ‘a machine for living in’, which repelled those who saw the home as something altogether softer and more organic. Our Australian terminology didn’t help, either, calling an apartment ‘a unit’, squeezing any drop of comfort out of those four letters. It’s been quite a journey getting to this state. Although it’s a huge topic, in this little series I’d like to explore different aspects of comfort in the home and how we got here. Sometimes it was an invention that transformed our lives, other times it was society. The evolution of objects has given us so much choice to live in the ways that we want, allowing us to create a home that pleases and satisfies us, finding comfort in ways that nourish us. Our homes may have all the practicalities of physical ease but they have something more ephemeral, too, a comfort zone that speaks volumes about who and what we are.