Living Rooms

By Sam Johnson-Schlee

In this radical and elegiac essay, Living Rooms invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying economic reality.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 128

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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 blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.

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?