What Ten Years of Writing and Curating Home Has Taught Me... About Home – by Sonia Solicari

What Ten Years of Writing and Curating Home Has Taught Me

For the past decade, as Director of the Museum of the Home in London, I have had almost every assumption I once held about home challenged, unsettled and reshaped.

Home, I have learned, is never simply a building or a collection of rooms. It is something people make, negotiate, remember and sometimes lose. It can be a source of security and identity, but it can also be a site of conflict, exclusion and inequality.

With so much of our lives happening at home, the history of home is inseparable from the histories of work, family, gender, class, migration, consumption, technology and politics.

Perhaps that is what has surprised me most: the more closely you look at home, the less personal it becomes.

The personal is political

We tend to imagine home as a retreat from the world. But it is increasingly difficult to sustain that idea. Home is where we negotiate some of the most fundamental things that make us human: intimacy, care, money, power, ageing, illness, pleasure and pain.

‘The personal is political’ is a phrase that became widely known through Carol Hanisch’s 1970 essay, which argued that experiences that appear personal are often shaped by wider social and political structures. Seen through this lens, the home becomes a site of almost constant interplay between the individual and the world beyond the front door.

What we buy, what we eat, how we heat our homes, who cleans them, who cares for children and older people, how much space we have and who has access to it are all connected to much bigger systems.

The Wages for Housework campaign remains, to my mind, one of the most fundamental challenges to how we understand a late-capitalist society. It asks us to recognise something that is simultaneously obvious and remarkably easy to overlook: the economy depends upon the work that happens in homes, much of it unpaid and historically undertaken by women.

The home powers the world in ways we rarely acknowledge. And, at its most extreme, the struggle over home becomes a struggle over land, territory and belonging. Many conflicts, including wars and forced migrations, are ultimately connected to the question of who has the right to live where – and who gets to call somewhere home.

Home is changing faster than ever

We are living through a period in which the material culture of home is multiplying at extraordinary speed

When I joined the Museum in 2017, we were being offered complete 1950s interiors, as the generation who had decorated their homes as young people passed away. These interiors could survive remarkably intact because people tended to live with things for longer. A room might be decorated once and then remain substantially unchanged for decades.

It is now much harder to find intact interiors from the 1980s or 90s. Part of this is economic. Part of it is technological. Part of it is cultural. The rise of disposable income, mass production and cheaper furniture has made it easier to replace rather than repair, to redecorate rather than adapt. Social media has also accelerated our awareness of how our homes might look – and how we might meet trends.

For much of the history of museums, collecting has been about preserving things that might otherwise disappear and increasingly I wonder about the domestic legacy we leave future generations, from the extraordinary piles of stuff: flat-pack furniture, discarded electronics, plastic objects, packaging, clothes and all the things we bought cheaply and briefly loved before throwing away. What’s the story we want to tell about our domestic selves?

Climate change and artificial intelligence will challenge the meaning of home

The process of writing the book, from the initial idea to the final draft, took about three years. During that time I became increasingly conscious of the extraordinary shifts in domestic life playing out in real time. How can I possibly keep up with current thinking and how might a museum devoted to the home reflect such rapid change.

Even while I was proofing the book during the heatwave of 2026, another transformation became impossible to ignore. Suddenly, many people found themselves living in homes that were becoming uninhabitable in extreme temperatures. At the Museum, we grappled daily with whether we would have to close as temperatures rose. Our gardens dried up. News reached us of devastating floods in Nepal. We prayed for rain and feared it at the same time.

In the UK, climate change has stopped being an abstract future problem. It has entered the home. The question of what makes a house a home now has to include its relationship to climate and nature.

And then there is technology. During the three years of planning the book, artificial intelligence moved from something many people encountered only indirectly to something suddenly present in everyday life. We have been living with algorithms, smart devices and increasingly automated homes for years, but the scale of the transition now facing us feels different.

The home has always been a place where new technologies become intimate. The washing machine, refrigerator, television, telephone and computer all changed domestic life not simply because they were new objects, but because they changed how we spent our time and were couched as ‘improvements’.

As I write this blog, protests are happening on the museum’s doorstep as local people campaign against plans to build an AI data centre on Brick Lane - and six homes for social rent in a borough where there is a waiting list of 30,000 households.

The question is not simply what new technology will we put into our homes, but what kind of home life will it create and will it be better or worse than before?

You have to be like water

There’s really no such thing as a ‘history of home’,  more a collection of lived experiences that can be cyclical rather than linear - that ebb and flow.

One of the galleries at Museum of the Home opens with a letter from a man who has moved to London in the 1780s for paid work – he writes back to his mother about London being noisy, dirty and expensive and he misses his mum’s cooking – so what’s changed? His domestic space may look different from ours but he feels the same.

People move. Families shift. Technologies arrive. Climate changes. Objects break. Rooms are adapted. Memories fade and return. New people bring new traditions. Old assumptions are challenged and just as many stay the same.

Home is not a fixed thing. It is something we are continually making and remaking. Exploring home requires an adaptive, flexible approach and an openness to tell the stories that people want to tell, on their own terms.

Design is important – but it has to be lived

How we design for home is hugely important – fundamental, even. Increasingly, the question of who gets to decide how homes are designed is becoming more equitable as user-led and participatory approaches become widespread.

As a curator, I have always loved beautiful objects. They give me enormous pleasure but, to really understand home, we need to understand what happens when design leaves the showroom. Was that chair actually comfortable? Could you easily assemble that cabinet? Did the kitchen really work? Could you clean it? Could you reach the cupboard? What happened when the children came home? Did anyone undermine the rules of the space? Did they jump on the bed? Draw on the walls? Prop things open?

These questions may sound trivial. They aren't. They reveal the difference between a house as it is designed and a home as it is lived.

One of my favourite examples in the book is the plank of wood at Down House that Charles Darwin's children used to slide down the stairs. That small piece of wood tells us something important about domestic life. Homes are not simply designed spaces. They are spaces of improvisation, play, accidents, resistance and adaptation.

Asking someone to describe their childhood home is one of the most powerful questions you can ask

Whether the memory is positive or negative, the question tends to produce a flood of fragmentary experience – Proustian moments. Sights, sounds, smells and textures come back. A particular carpet. The colour of a bedroom wall. The sound of a front door closing. The smell of toast. The texture of a particular sofa. Colours that seem brighter and summers that seem sunnier.

Sometimes the memories are joyful. Sometimes they are painful. Often they are both. Collections can act as a trigger for memories that are not, strictly speaking, contained within the object at all. This has made me think differently about the responsibility we carry as cultural organisations creating and recreating home for a visiting public. Alongside being repositories of stuff, we hold emotional and psychological space and we need to do this with care and kindness.

The world needs more museums of the home

Perhaps, finally, over ten years of thinking about home, I have come to believe that museums devoted to domestic experience are more important than ever.

If we truly want to understand a society, we should look not only at its monuments and institutions, but at its kitchens and bedrooms. At its furniture. Its bathrooms. Its toys. Its rubbish. Its routines.

Look at who cooks. Look at who cleans. Look at who has a bedroom of their own. Look at who works from the kitchen table. Look at who can afford to heat the house .Look at who has a garden. Look at what gets thrown away. Look at who gets to stay – and who is forced to leave.

These are not marginal questions. They are ways of understanding power, wealth, care, aspiration and inequality.

That is why I think the world needs more museums of the home: places that take the everyday seriously, that preserve not only beautiful objects but difficult memories, and that ask us to look again at the spaces we think we already understand.

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Real Rooms: Creating, Recreating and Visiting Home by Sonia Solicari illustrates a fascinating range of curated interiors in museum and cultural settings and is a unique sourcebook on storytelling and domestic space. It will be published by Lund Humphries on 13th November 2026. Pre-order now!

Sonia Solicari is a British curator, writer, and museum director. Since 2017, she has led the transformation of the Museum of the Home, London, overseeing its landmark redevelopment and the reinvention of the former Geffrye Museum into a dynamic institution exploring the meaning of home through contemporary issues, history and creative practice. Previously, she was Head of Guildhall Art Gallery and London’s Roman Amphitheatre, and a curator at the Victoria and Albery Museum, London.

Image captions and credits:

The personal is political – View into courtyard of 1930s at the Birmingham Back to backs. © National Trust Images/Dennis Gilbert.

Home is changing faster than ever – Detail from A High-Rise Flat in 2005, Museum of the Home, London. Photo: Jaron James/Museum of the Home.

Climate change and artificial intelligence will challenge the meaning of home – Small Things Are Possible by Abel Holsborough. Image: Hallie Adukë Primus. 

You have to be like water – Museum of the Home: A Converted Flat in 2049. Photo: Jaron James/Museum of the Home.

Design is important – but it has to be lived – The Darwin children’s slide on the stairs at Down House. © Historic England Archive.

Asking someone to describe their childhood home is one of the most powerful questions you can ask – Recreated Desk at Dylan Thomas Birthplace. Photo: Sonia Solicari with permission from Dylan Thomas Birthplace.

The world needs more museums of the home – View of Rooms Through Time Galleries, Museum of the Home. Photo: Jaron James/Museum of the Home.