Home Decoration, Aesthetics, and Identity: Exploring Meanings in Dwelling Cultures

Abstract

Deeply rooted in personal and social identity, over the last two decades, the home has become an increasingly propulsive area of research within the social sciences and humanities. The concept of home often serves as a platform for understanding complex social relationships between individuals and groups and reveals the meanings arising from interactions with material culture. In this paper, we use data obtained through the interview method to find out how our participants – younger middle-aged, middleclass professionals – value the aesthetic dimension of their home and what meanings they ascribe to it. The analysis of the narratives on aesthetics, taste, and processes
related to decision-making provides insight into how certain attitudes are associated with various dimensions of participants’ identities. The results demonstrated that through the elaboration of the visual identity of space, it is possible to articulate different aspects of personal and collective identities. Although the obtained data show how taste and
attitudes towards aesthetics function as inherited cultural capital, they also reveal how other cultural influences in a complex postmodern consumer context shape attitudes and tastes beyond directly inherited values.