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Home: A Short History of an Idea
by Witold Rybczynski
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Customer Reviews:
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 
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interesting 
Fascinating history of the home from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, with a focus on how the built domestic environment influences us and vice versa. The cultural focus is western and European.
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Decent and fun, but not much more
May be of interest to househunters trying to envision what their happy home to be might want to be. It's basically a selective history of the concepts of home and comfort, related to changing forms of the family, over the last four or five hundred years. It's full of interesting factoids, probably ultimately of less significance than Rybczynski had hoped, but he's a good writer and charming (a hair too warm and fuzzy for me). It's a light, easy and pleasant read. It didn't leave me with anything of... more info
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Where the hearth is 
You probably have notions about what "home" means, and those notions probably revolve around your immediate family, domestic comfort and convenience, with a dash of nostalgia. Most likely you share my sense that home has been thus for a long time, subject to the whims of fashion and demands of social hierarchy. What I learned from Witold Rybczynski is that those are very near-sighted suppositions. The modern (Western) idea of a home is very new, historically. Even the notion of "family" that occupies so... more info
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Home, history of a concept
Home is an articulate, rapid reading book about the developements leading to the current concept of "home". Tying history, architecture, sociology and technology together the emerging concept of home and comfort developes in clear visualizations.
After reading this book I now appreciate the evolution of the contradictory outlooks over time and how they affect our current drives in creating our personal living spaces.
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