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A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or more human occupants, and sometimes various pet. Homes provide sheltered spaces, for instance rooms, where domestic activity can be performed such as sleeping, preparing food, eating and hygiene as well as providing spaces for work and leisure such as remote working, studying and playing.
Physical forms of homes can be static such as a house or an apartment, mobile such as a houseboat, trailer or yurt or digital such as virtual space. The aspect of 'home' can be considered across scales; from the micro scale showcasing the most intimate spaces of the individual dwelling and direct surrounding area to the macro scale of the geographic area such as town, village, city, country or planet.
The concept of 'home' has been researched and theorized across disciplines – topics ranging from the idea of home, the interior, the psyche, liminal space, contested space to gender and politics. (2025). 9780802099686, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802099686 The home as a concept expands beyond residence as contemporary lifestyles and technological advances redefine the way the global population lives and works. The concept and experience encompasses the likes of exile, yearning, Belongingness, homesickness and homelessness.
In southern Africa, early modern humans regularly used sea caves as shelter starting about 180,000 years ago, when they learned to exploit the sea for the first time. The oldest known site is PP13B at Pinnacle Point. This may have allowed rapid expansion of humans out of Africa and colonization of areas of the world such as Australia by 60–50,000 years ago. Throughout southern Africa, Australia, and Europe, early modern humans used caves and rock shelters as sites for rock art, such as those at Giants Castle. Caves such as the yaodong in China were used for shelter; other caves were used for burials (such as rock-cut tombs), or as religious sites (such as Buddhist caves). Among the known sacred caves are China's Cave of a Thousand Buddhas and the sacred caves of Crete. As technology progressed, humans and other hominids began constructing their own dwellings. Buildings such as huts and have been used for living since the late Neolithic.
On Bronze Age Crete, the Minoan palace at Knossos incorporated residential quarters with light wells and lustral basins, reflecting an emphasis on light and ritual purity in domestic space. Surrounding settlements adopted similar rectilinear house plans centered on storage magazines and communal courts. By the 1st century BC in Ancient Rome, the affluent lived in Roman villa—multiroom urban houses built around an atrium and peristyle garden—while the majority resided in multi-story apartment blocks called insulae, often cramped and prone to fire hazards.
Concurrently, in the Islamic world from the 8th century onwards, the inward-facing courtyard house became predominant. Private residences were organized around shaded central courts with water features, mashrabiya screens for ventilation and privacy, and richly decorated plasterwork and tile. In East Asia, the Chinese siheyuan compound—standardized during the Yuan and Ming dynasties—offered multigenerational living around a north–south axis courtyard, with ancillary rooms for servants and extended family.
The Renaissance (14th–17th centuries) brought classical ideals into domestic design. In Florence, the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (begun 1444) introduced rusticated façades, symmetrical floor plans, and internal loggias, while Venetian villas by Palladio emphasized proportion, harmony, and integration with landscaped gardens. Advances in glassmaking allowed larger, clearer windows, and masonry chimneys gradually replaced central hearths, vastly improving light and air quality within homes. From the 14th to the 16th century, homelessness was perceived of as a "vagrancy problem" and legislative responses to the problem were predicated upon the threat it may pose to the state.
A result of the longstanding association between home and women, 18th century English women, of upper-class status, were scorned for pursuing activities outside of the home, thus seen to be of undesirable character. The concept of home took on unprecedent prominence by the 18th century, reified by cultural practice.
The concept of a Home automation arose in the 19th century in turn with electricity having been introduced to homes in a limited capacity. The distinction between home and work formulated in the 20th century, with home acting as sanctuary. Modern definitions portray home as a site of supreme comfort and familial intimacy, operating as a buffer to the greater world.
The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household. Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, although households may also be other social groups, such as or, in a rooming house, unconnected individuals. Some houses only have a dwelling space for one family or similar-sized group; larger houses called or may contain numerous family dwellings in the same structure. A house may be accompanied by outbuildings, such as a garage for vehicles or a shed for gardening equipment and tools. A house may have a backyard or a front yard or both, which serve as additional areas where inhabitants can relax or eat. Houses may provide "certain activities, which gradually accumulate meaning until they become homes".
Joseph Rykwert distinguished between home and house in their physicality; a house requires a building whereas a home does not. Home and house are often used interchangeably, although their connotations may differ: house being "emotionally neutral" and home evoking "personal, cognitive aspects". By the mid-18th century, the definition of home had extended beyond a house. "Few English words are filled with the emotional meaning of the word home".
A houseboat is a boat that has been designed or modified to be used primarily as a home. Some houseboats are not motorized, because they are usually moored, kept stationary at a fixed point and often tethered to land to provide utilities. However, many are capable of operation under their own power. Float house is a Canadian and American term for a house on a float (raft); a rough house may be called a shanty boat. In Western countries, houseboats tend to be either owned privately or rented out to holiday-goers, and on some canals in Europe, people dwell in houseboats all year round. Examples of this include, but are not limited to, Amsterdam, London, and Paris.
A traditional yurt or ger is a portable round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by several distinct Nomad in the Eurasian Steppe. The structure consists of an angled assembly or latticework of wood or bamboo for walls, a door frame, ribs (poles, rafters), and a wheel (crown, compression ring) possibly steam-bent. The roof structure is often self-supporting, but large yurts may have interior posts supporting the crown. The top of the wall of self-supporting yurts is prevented from spreading by means of a tension band which opposes the force of the roof ribs. Modern yurts may be permanently built on a wooden platform; they may use modern materials such as steam-bent wooden framing or metal framing, canvas or tarpaulin, plexiglass dome, wire rope, or radiant barrier.
Personal insolvency, development or sustaining of mental disorder or severe physical incapacity without affordable care work commonly lead to a change of home. The underlying character of a home may be debased by structural defects, natural subsidence, neglect or soil contamination. are people who have fled their homes due to violence or persecution. They may seek temporary housing in a shelter, or claim asylum in another country in an attempt to relocate permanently. A dysfunctional home life commonly precipitates one's homelessness.
The dichotomy between home and homelessness is to the extent that the concept of home, scholars have said, is dependent on homelessness: "in a sense, without homelessness, we would not be concerned with what home means".
There exist many connotations regarding the concept of a home, including of security, identity, ritual and socialisation, varied definitions and residents may associate their home with meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships. Home has been described as an "essentially contested concept". Common connotations of home are espoused by both those with or without a home. It is the sociality and action of homes which some scholars have said conditions a house in to a home, which is, according to Gram-Hanssen, "a phenomenon made by its residents". Dysfunctional sociality may negate the sense of a residence being a home whereas the physical contents may endow the sense; alienated from home one may feel "metaphorically homeless". Romantic or nostalgic notions are typical in the conceptions of "ideal homes", at once a cultural and individual concept. An ideal working-class home in Postwar Britain was one of comfort and cleanliness, plentiful with food and compassion.
In modern America, an owned house has greater cachet as a home than other residences; debate exists as to if a rooming house can provide a home. Some housing scholars have contended that a conflation of house and home is the result of popular media and capitalist interest. Differing cultures may perceive the concept of a home differently, ascribing less value to the privacy of a residence or the residence itself – although housing issues have been seen as of great concern to immigrants. The home can render to men and women in significant differences: men conditioned to experience great control and little labour and vice versa for women; homelessness too can be subject to differences per gender. Sociologist Shelley Mallett preposed the idea of home as abstractions: space, feeling, praxis or "a way of being in the world". Abstract notions of home are present in the proverb "A house is not a home".
Since it can be said that humans are generally creatures of Habituation, the state of a person's home has been known to physiologically influence their behavior, , and overall mental health. Marianne Gullestad wrote of the home as the center of and as an attempt to amalgamate everyday life; one's conduct there, she said, can reflect greater culture or social values, such as insinuating the home to be the domain of women. To be Homesickness is to desire Belongingness, said Zygmunt Bauman. Places like homes can trigger self-reflection, thoughts about who someone is or used to be or who they might become. These types of reflections also occur in places where there is a collective historical identity, such as Gettysburg or Ground Zero. The time spent with one's home is a considerable element in establishing one's attachment. Those without significant time spent of their life in a residence often struggle to consider home as a feature of residences. The perception of one's home can extend beyond the residence itself, to their neighbourhood, family, workplace or nation and one may feel as though they have multiple homes; to have felt at home beyond residence can be a significant element in one's appraisal of their life, a time in which notions of home, it has been observed, are more profound. The connection between home and family is pertinent, to the extent that some scholars consider the terms to be synonymous.
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