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family’s but also in a products’ life. That certain dishes are reserved for festive
events could be the most common example. More impressive, though, is how
the whole apartment may be scheduled to meet the household’s social life. In
the sample, Hannele told about how the renovation should be finished just in
time for a graduation party. Similarly, Laura and Sanna explained the changes
in the interior decoration by mentioning the recent christenings that both had
held in their home.
Most homes in the sample conformed to all three functions: they served as
galleries, museums and hotels. But if a home is used for just one practice, it is
used as a hotel: for physical recreation like eating, sleeping, personal hygiene
and occasional exercising. In the sample, only Ilmari and Mervi mentioned
that they, at least at some point, had not cooked at all, while Theo, Anniina,
Laura and Tiina said that cooking was very important to them. Everybody
in the sample was using their home to sleep in and to take care of personal
hygiene, although it was not always quite as routinized as one would want it to
be: Theo and Hannele may have felt the disruption of even the most mundane
of routines because they were at some point dwelling elsewhere due to the
renovation work being done.
In this analogy of home as a hotel, running the hotel in the home is about
creating and maintaining the infrastructure and related practices that facilitate
the basic biological needs of eating and sleeping and the social needs of hygiene
and socialising. From the appropriation of products point of view, this means
the acquisition and management of, for example, dining furniture, dishes and
cutlery, food ingredients, beds, bed linen, towels, detergents, toiletries, cleaning
equipment and conditioners for keeping materials fit. All of these items (and
many more) form the basic infrastructure that facilitates dwelling. They also
determine what particular type of infrastructure is created and renewed based
on the household’s actions, which in turn are part of creating and maintaining
a household’s moral economy. From a dweller’s point of view, one needs to be
the head, staff and the guest in the hotel where one is living, often with other
people – the family members and the occasional visitors.
Others have studied dwelling with a specific focus on what is here called
“running a hotel”. In this particular body of literature, the context is often the
cultural history of technologies, especially the socially constructed development
and adoption of home appliances (Schwartz Cowan 1985; Pantzar 2000;
Shove 2000). I think that the emergence of the idea of hygiene and the following
ideal of cleanliness are the most important phenomena not only related to
the notion of home as hotel, but also in general to dwelling and perhaps to all
of contemporary consumer culture because it underlines nearly everything that
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