Your Home Made Perfect

Abstract

This paper investigates a new, popular, award-winning reality television show, Your Home Made Perfect. Drawing on insights from Sara Ahmed’s work on the promise of happiness, our thematic analysis of nineteen episodes of Your Home shows how architectural entertainment is uniquely positioned through its use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology to circulate happiness and uplifting emotions and to critique the power imbalances of architect-client relationships. The paper argues how Your Home foregrounds happy emotions to the re-design of homes, where emotions are mobilized through design visualizations that turn both home and architects into “happy objects.” Moreover, through “happy objects,” this property television show seeks to deflect anxieties of housing precarity and growing wealth disparity. Finally, the paper reveals how architectural TV entertainment reinforces regressive ideas of identity and home ownership.

Introduction

Home is powerful because it is understood to be a haven from the ills of the world, a place to return to, and a material expression and representation of our true selves (Miller 2008). But home is also a multi-scaler concept. Home is not only the physical boundary between ourselves and others; it also serves as the grounds and naturalization of citizenship, belonging, and national identity (Duyvendak 2011, 117). Therefore, home is a political ally demarcating who belongs, who is authentic, who should stay, and who is excluded (Duyvendak 2011, 115). Home is used to support these varying meanings because it feels natural symbolically, materially, and affectively. Yet this natural place of the home, for Bourdieu, is taken for granted because it is a familiar habitat (Bourdieu 1999). Home, for Bourdieu, is not natural at all, instead it is culturally created. The politics of home and the naturalizing of home is bound up with wider power relations and is evident in popular culture and media coverage, which valorizes some identities as being at home and others as not (Blunt and Dowling 2022). Moreover, media representations actively mediate and constitute worlds—including that of the home (Anderson 2019). This is apparent, for Marling (1994) and Spigel (2001), in how representations of the home in the media construct social spatial scripts around the idealized life, which impact on how people live in their homes.

Property TV in the UK developed in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the housing boom and government initiatives to support housing development (Chambers 2020). Property TV plays to the value placed on home ownership, financially, personally, and morally, which, as McElroy outlines, has led the genre to have “its peculiar purchase on ideas of value in contemporary culture” (2017, 528). The idealization of the home in property TV programs intensified after the 2008 global financial crisis, though there was a focus shift toward renovation and finding value in the home within a time of housing precarity (Bruce and Druick 2017; Chambers 2020; Hanan 2010; McElroy 2017). These programs make evident how “television’s ideological commitment to home ownership is adaptable to conditions of economic boom and bust” and, more recently, to changes to how we live during and post-COVID (McIntyre 2021, 69). In this paper, we focus on Your Home Made Perfect (Your Home), a reality television (RTV) series that centers on a couple renovating their home. It was developed and first aired before COVID-19, but the second series and its viewership increase coincided with lockdowns (Bemijay 2023). Your Home, as a form of property TV, is a genre where families with their own resources enact self-improvement through consumption (McCarthy 2007; McElroy 2017). Similar to other “Lifestyle” and property TV shows, such as Grand Designs and The Block, Your Home tells us how to make our home look “beautiful, functional and profitable” which property TV frames as desirable and aspirational (Chambers 2020, 105; Shaw 2021), but also supports a “sense that the home is never done,” aligning its viewers with capitalist values (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 1; Vercel 2022, 303). The aspiration for a beautiful, functional and profitable home is not limited by home ownership but also incorporates the fantasy of home ownership, which is also “part of the broader logic of consumerist aspiration” (McElroy 2017, 532).

Your Home, while ideologically similar to other UK property TV, differs from them due to the use of Virtual Reality (VR). The focus of the show shifts from the pragmatics of design to the reveal of the design, as the producer of the show outlines:

At a time of uncertainty in the property market, we wanted to shift the focus away from the tough times of a build towards all the joyful bits, but we also spotted an opportunity. We could give people a chance to see designs beyond their wildest imaginations, even before opening a can of paint or touching a single brick. (Broadcast 2019, n.p).

While Your Home situates itself as a distraction from housing precarity, the show still relies on valuing home ownership, self-improvement through consumption, and the owners personal and moral character. Of note, Your Home’s use of technology was recognized by the UK Broadcast Awards 2021 as the best original program. The judges called the show “revolutionary” due to the “clever and innovative use of virtual reality and graphics,” making it “an exciting and heart-warming watch” (Broadcast Awards 2021).

The paper argues how Your Home foregrounds happy emotions to the re-design of homes, where emotions are mobilized through design visualizations that turn both home and architects into “happy objects” (Ahmed 2008). Moreover, through “happy objects,” this TV show seeks to deflect anxieties of housing precarity and growing wealth disparity. To explore this, the paper is structured as follows. After outlining our theoretical approach and the methods used, we focus on how happiness and uplifting emotions circulate through first, architectural visualization (VR) and second, the reshaping of both the architect and the profession as ordinary, accessible, and caring. Finally, the paper reveals how happy emotions through architectural TV entertainment reinforce regressive ideas of identity and home ownership.

Toward a Promise of Happiness

Recent contributions to reality television and new media studies have focused on technology’s socio-cultural, political, affective, and emotional impact in our daily lives (e.g., Ash 2010, 2016; Kavka 2008; Ross 2020). Your Home, similar to other property TV shows, uses uplifting and happy emotions to create an affective relationship with the audience, supported by narrative structure, close up shots, voice overs, and music—but is distinct through the use of VR (Bednarek 2013; Chambers 2020). This is an important distinction as VR has the capacity to mediate and change human connections (Rubin 2018), such as feelings of empathy (Nakamura 2020).

Sara Ahmed’s work on happiness helps us frame how the home plays out through the series as a particular type of promise. Following Ahmed (2010), happiness can be described as an intentional orientation; that is, we are directed some objects rather than others. Your Home continually directs us to seeing home and being at home through home ownership and the nuclear family as a source of happiness, rather than to other housing options such as multigenerational living, co-housing, and shared housing. According to Ahmed, the promise of happiness takes the form of a simple conditional statement: “if you have this or have that, or if you do this or do that, then happiness is what follows” (2010, 29). The cultural imperative is home ownership, but Your Home extends this: happiness is achieved via visualization of a home that reflects oneself and meets the family’s needs through alteration. Happiness is presented as a clear destination or endpoint. Your Home orientates us toward the promise of happiness through values tightly woven to the idea of home ownership, improving the home, with the endpoint of happiness. The visualization of the home becomes a happy object, where the medium of television amplifies a sense of affective proximity to the lives we watch on the screen (Kavka 2008).

However, the home can be exclusionary. Your Home also tells us something about how the world is available as “a space for action where things ‘have a certain place’ or are ‘in place’ . . . which makes some bodies feel at home, but not others . . . affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (Ahmed 2007, 150, 153). Your Home orientates us toward material, social, and affective qualities of home, linking particular people to particular spaces, making visible who can reach out who can take up space. But there are limits to happiness. For Ahmed, these apply where bodies do not feel a likeness, bodies that “feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space” (2007, 157). Space here does not afford or extend a sense of welcome; people in these spaces might feel stressed or out of place, which affects what the body can do (Ahmed 2007). Considering Ahmed’s argument in the context of TV and media representation of people and architecture, we could ask what does it feel like when people only see white middle class couples, and does it feel comfortable to take up such home spaces? In this paper, we argue Your Home reinforces a particular social and cultural expectation of who can feel at home in the world and what type of world they can extend into.

To analyze Your Home, we reviewed the first two series, which included fourteen episodes, and five episodes from the third series. Each hour-long episode was viewed and studied multiple times to understand Your Home’s structure and scripted pattern. Throughout Your Home, the dream of home and the good life is embedded within a familiar and conventional fairy tale structure, evoking foundational mythology, where insurmountable odds are overcome, in this case, with the magical assistance of VR to create the home of one’s dreams. Each show is structured into three parts, following the opening scene. The title sequence introduces a montage of short scenes of how VR operates in the show, and how people experience the design reveal. The host of the show, Angela Scanlon, walks the audience through the VR process in this title sequence, and the tri-part structure of the show. In the first part, the clients articulate the home’s problem and how it prevents family connection, as well as their struggles to move forward, often because they cannot read architectural drawings, and the emotional impact of this. In this section, Scanlon talks to three-dimensional images of the home as a visual tool for the audience to understand how the problems of the home impact the homeowners. The three-dimensional image communicates a particular idea of home and operates to make the homes appear to be an idealized stand-alone home, while in actuality some are semi-detached; and, even a few are terraced homes (a row of joined houses). In the second part, the clients are taken through the design visualization through VR. Before the clients are shown the design, Scanlon explains to the audience how VR will work on Your Home:

The architects will reveal their plans to the couple not on paper but in virtual reality. And before the design reveal. [She holds onto the VR headset and points at them.] It all starts with these googles. Where they can experience our incredible graphics for real using these we can show and do anything. We can take away walls, control the colour scheme, we can even control the sun. Then using a bit of telly magic, and this green screen we can transport people into the design. Where we can all see the architects’ ideas in extraordinary detail. (S1)

This monolog is repeated for all of the episodes. Visually, the audience see the clients and architects put the headset on, but what they see next is the clients and architects walking and moving around the visualization of the design without the headset on. This visualization is created in post-production rather than a reflection of what the client and architects experience, however the audience are knowingly aware that these images are staged. The VR visualizations are the main part of the show, and they are filled with emotions of joy, happiness, and tears, when the clients can finally understand what their home might look like after the renovation. In the first two series, two architects, Robert Jamison and Laura Jane Clark, each pitch a design through VR. Once the design is chosen, the client manages the build process. In the third part, the homeowners reveal the final design, where the focus is on uplifting and happy emotions.

To perform an inductive qualitative analysis, each of the nineteen episodes were viewed by both authors separately, and notes in response were compared to extract common themes (Thomas 2006). In terms of the content, we looked at the program's three key stages and focused on how emotions were mobilized and framed by the narrative, camera shots, and sound to structure the emotional message. The themes that emerged were the problems of the home and what the homeowners desired their home to feel like, the problems of technical architectural drawings, VR visualization to help understand the design, and the shifting relationship between clients, objects, and architects through VR. The second approach was to identify the demographics of the show. The categories we looked at were: sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic background, and if home owners were single, couples or varied family configurations. In terms of architectural or spatial categories, we focused on how identity is tied to particular representations of home ownership. The next section explores how Your Home draws on a thickened representation of home and how happiness “sticks” to the VR visualization of home (Ahmed 2010).

Virtual Reality Visualisations and Happiness

All architecture starts as representation. Through media, architectural ideas are depicted and made tangible to a client, a jury, or the public. The professional language of drawing and visualization that has evolved through abstract symbolism creates an objective distance, facilitating social closure around the profession (Robbins 1994). Edward Robbins describes architecture technical drawings as a form of social closure that “will mystify clients in much the same way as medical language mystifies most patients” (1994, 31). Your Home clarifies that drawings as social closure are problematic and celebrates making architectural visualization legible.

VR as a visualization tool has undergone sustained research and, in brief, has been used to explore areas such as developing empathy, connection, and compassion (Foxman et al. 2021), allowing people to travel to remote destinations (Cheong 1995); to explore community, health, embodiment, and identity (Davis and Chansiri 2019; Hillis 1999); to offer multisensory realness (Ross 2020); and to question notions of embodiment and presence (Hillis 1999; Suh and Eun Lee 2005). In architecture, VR allows the client to understand and change a design without the cost of building (Dingli and Cassar 2014). Your Home leverages the potential of VR to turn the joy of the design reveal into a televisual experience.

Your Home captures our attention by first taking the client through VR, into a visualization of their existing home. The power of the visualization lies in its accurate representation of their home and offers experiences of lighting, color, texture, and scale. Without exception, seeing an accurate representation of their home elicits a “wow” moment: “Oh my goodness, oh it is so weird, it looks exactly the same” (S1, E1). Your Home focuses on the moment and celebrates this sense of spatial presence, of inhabiting an architectural visualization with a sense of “being there” (Blackman 2024, 2; Ross 2020; Suh and Eun Lee 2005). This immersive experience for the audience, created by VR’s dynamic representation with luminous qualities and high definition, gives a sense of realness to the imagery (Engberg and Bolter 2020, 83; Degen et al. 2017), and the design.

After the scripted reveal of their home, the clients explain their problems with traditional architectural drawings, plans, and sections: “I am very bad at visualizing” (S1, E4).; “You don’t get that in paper” (S1, E5). The clients confirm how traditional visualization through two-dimensional architectural plans and sections are hard to read and have a thinner presence. After this problem is named, the program shifts to the VR reveal. Through this VR reveal of the design, which is accompanied, sometimes immediately, by an overflow of joy and happiness—the clients’ experience of architectural drawings is transformed. In the first episode of series two, Julian expresses his overwhelming response to the beauty of the transformation while viewing the proposed design. He takes the headset off and cries. The camera secures the emotional display of both Julian and his partner Sylvia to create a sense of intimacy with the audience. This positive emotionality through the active manipulation of spatiotemporal aspects of VR allows a heightened sense of intimacy, a “with-ness” in and through materiality that has an affective charge (Ahmed 2008). The outpouring of tears, gratitude, and happiness connected to the home appears genuine and unrehearsed.

VR, like technical drawings, still operates in the space of translation (between representation and the final building) but closes the gap between building and visualization in this televisual framing – by immersing the viewer within the visualization of the design. Traditional architectural representations of plans and sections have a thinned presence by reducing space and the depth to a line on the page, making it hard to understand how light, for example, will operate in the space and over time. In series one, episode three, architect Robert uses the light in VR to highlight his design. As the light moves across the sky, it activates the surface in space. The positive sense of intensity is accompanied by the “wows” of the clients as the passing of light is made tangible and brings the clients closer to an understanding of a lived space (Ash 2010). Here, VR fosters a sense of presentness, of being there (Ash 2016), eliciting an embodied reaction for the audience (Anderson 2009; Lorimer 2010). As the audience, we witness the collapse of the boundary between expert and non-expert, when the visualization of architecture shifts from illegible to legible, understood, and felt.

Visualizations can also create a realistic sense of presence through colors and texture. In contrast to the chromophobic architectural discipline, Your Home is saturated with color, which adds to the image’s intensity and thickened presence by amplifying the visualization's sensual liveness (Stead 2002; Till 2008). The thickened presence is also supported by the texture of the visualization: VFX as the rendering engine adds particles, grains, and fabric details, giving a richer sense of three-dimensional space. The contrast, color, and texture create a realistic portrayal of the future architecture. A promise of a better future where the viewer “go[es] forward with an image” (Pink 2011, 7). Your Home highlights how emotions are tied to visualizations: the thickened materiality allows a being-with or “with-ness” for the homeowners to their ideal home such that the “relative proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness” (Ahmed 2010, 22), as well as offers the promise of future happiness for the television audience. This affirms for the viewer a sense of collective belonging through the promise of what an ideal home offers (Ahmed 2010).

Ordinary Objects and the Caring Architect

The image of the architect as male, white, and middle class, singular in his vision with mastery over a project, persists in the media (Anthony et al. 2013; Samuel 2018;). This is an image of the architect who builds architecture as a statement of themselves—a visionary who is reckless, unaware, and uncaring of budget, time constraints, and community concerns. Similar to the architecture profession’s attempt to refocus its image (RIBA 2017; Samuel 2018), Your Home questions the authoritative architect, distanced from the client, by focusing on how the architect is supportive, uplifting and caring. These emotions and emotional reactions are less well associated with the built environment and the role of architects (Bates et al. 2016, XIII).

Emotional intimacy between the client, architect, and the audience is facilitated by staging how VR operates on Your Home. As already alluded, the audience observe the clients and architects as if they are occupying the VR visualization without a headset on. Your Home erases the frame; the clients and the architect now “stand in the same relationship to the content” (Golding 2019, 345). This collapsing of technical boundaries sets up VR as a site of care and collaboration because the two protagonists now share the same space where the audience can now read their emotional reactions. Your Home’s use of the green screen televisually remediates VR, so that the human face, which embodies powerful human expressivity and acts to supplement digital media’s experiential affects, provides information and capital on RTV (Hansen 2003). Cemented through the televisual experience is the relationship between the clients and architects occurring in a space of care and happiness: VR and the relations between the architect and client become a “happy object” (Ahmed 2010). For Ahmed, happy objects “refer to not only physical or material things but also to anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, styles, as well as aspirations” (2010, 29).

The host, Scanlon, is quite clear on the shift toward Your Home framing architects as relatable rather than dictatorial experts, as she articulates:

The days of people such as Gok Wan telling you, “Oh, you’re only allowed to wear that style,” are over. That’s so restrictive and we’ve thrown away those rule books now. I want to give people the same confidence for our homes. I liken it to the way I used to think of priests and doctors – reverentially, because they have the book and they must know, and you have to accept what you’re given. A lot of people feel that way with architects and builders (as cited in Rampton 2021, n.p).

Rather than placing architects or architecture on a pedestal, the show places value on connecting with the client through democratic language, exposing the disciplinary mechanism to control and create distance through language. The displacing of architects from a hierarchical position over the audience is expressed through Scanlon’s interaction with Robert (architect). Robert represents more historical architectural values. In one episode, he slips into architectural pretense and describes how “architecture is about sculpting space with light”; Scanlon responds by stating, “hello Mumma.” Scanlon uses the malapropism for comedic effect to mock Robert – to level the social hierarchy (Livingstone and Peter 1994). Scanlon’s humorous banter works to include the audience in the exchange. These types of exchanges cement the host as “one of us” who shares a common interest with the audience rather than an expert who provides lessons for the cultivated mind (Ouellette and Hay 2009, 31).

Laura (the second architect) focuses on creating personalized spatial stories through her design and addressing the pragmatic needs of the clients. She listens and responds with empathy and care to the needs of others. Scanlon compares Robert to Laura and reproves Robert for being unable to attend to the client in the same way as Laura and, as a result, missing kid-friendly elements of the design or the client’s storage needs. Laura is the image of a practical creative, who works at a human scale, placing value on client relations and pragmatic solutions (keeping to a budget) rather than artistic heroism (Alvesson 2001). We see in these moments how “emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us” (Ahmed 2012, 195). Here, Laura is celebrated because she gives her “energy to that which is beyond or outside your control” (Ahmed 2010, 186); caring is found through the rhythms and modes that operate between the architect and client. Through Laura’s active listening and Scanlon’s description of emotions, emotionality is constantly foregrounded in a purposeful way to develop “an affective connection to the viewers, making them engage emotionally” with Your Home (Bednarek 2013, 102).

Scanlon also shifts how she engages with architects. Rather than discussing form, she talks about ordinary elements of everyday architecture. For example, Scanlon asks the architects to define architecture, but does this through a reference to storage space. Scanlon asks Laura, “is storage architecture?” Laura replies, “yes, it is, it is so key to making a space work so that you can maximize your floor area.” Similarly, Scanlon asks Robert, “are you surprised at the thrill storage brings to people?” His response: one should have “no attachment to anything.” Robert subtly shames the values of the clients and the audience, who have accumulated possessions. Scanlon’s response to Robert is to diffuse his architectural positioning through humor. Your Home frays the edges of the architectural identity by celebrating the caring architect and also ordinary objects and design aspects. Your Home also limits the architectural problem to the interior, with the exception of Robert, who in series one, episode one, looks at the exterior form as part of the problem. Foregrounding the interiority of architecture as able to transform the spatial experience and the quality of our lives shifts architecture from the historical looked-at-ness of architectural form. Through emotionality, the show orientates and shapes us toward ordinary compelling objects, “directed in one way or another” (Ahmed 2010, 235). Through Your Home, happiness sticks to the supporting narrative around care and orientation toward architecture’s everyday and ordinary aspects.

Once the clients choose their design, Your Home removes the architect from supervising the construction of the building and having any “power-over” the client. We see the client developing an authentic expertise over the building process as we head toward a more documentary sequencing of development and perils of the build process (Watson 2006). The client in these sections of the show talks directly to the camera and to the audience. To celebrate the client’s empowerment further, Your Home, for the show, removes key people and stages in the design process, for example, the planning and consent process, public engagement, and the project manager. Critically, the design’s iterative and collaborative nature of working with the client is removed (Brown et al. 2010). As the architect Julian Mcintosh, in series three, episode one points out, normally, they would talk to a client six to eight times, but in this “telly” version they get one chance to talk to the client. Your Home presents a modified “real world” as the world of architecture. Having considered how Your Home shifts the way architects are perceived in the design and visualization stage, we turn next to how care and happy attachment to VR “attach us to the very conditions of our subordination” (Ahmed 2004, 12). Happiness is used to re-describe social norms of home, home ownership, and family, as a social good.

Happy Objects and Bodies

Critical to Your Home is how homeowners are brought closer to happiness and their dream home. We, as the audience, can share in this positive affective experience framed through the VR reveal and care. Yet, the experience still operates to reinforce social and political exclusions and hierarchies in terms of who can access home ownership, or what type of home they can access. Home is assumed to be a general indicator of happiness and stability, an assumption that our “relative proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness” (Ahmed 2010, 22; Duyvendak 2011). This sense of collective and shared affective investiture is evident through the show’s rhetorical ploy of “Your” Home, and activated by a script that focuses on the family being unable to connect through a poorly designed home. The couple then accepts particular scripts of living visualized through VR, where their issues of connection are solved within a bounded understanding of the home. The show finds purchase in the broader context of national importance placed on a “bounded understanding of home” of “belonging” and of “feeling at home” – in contemporary England (Duyvendak 2011).

This raises the question of the happy image of the home and who can belong within a stand-alone or semi-detached home. We looked at the demographics of the show by coding each episode. Our coding does not suggest that identity categories correlate to lived experience or that the coding relates to how people perceive themselves and their identity. Nor do we suggest that different identity categories are experienced similarly. While the demographics offer a blunt analysis tool, they enable us to consider who is visible and invisible in Your Home. In the first two series, a clear message from Your Home is that those renovating a home are a homogenous group. Your Home presents an image of the home owned by couples and families who are heterosexual, white, and middle class. Across the fourteen episodes, thirteen episodes follow heterosexual couples, only one episode follows a lesbian couple. In the first two series there are no single parents, blended, or intergenerational families. One is never single. Your Home supports a vision of UK society, which encourages “a particular type of intimate relationship, despite an increasing recognition of ‘diverse’ family forms,” including a rise in solo living (Wilkinson 2013, 206). Furthermore, of the fourteen couples, in only two episodes, there are representations of interracial couples. This low representation of diversity is also compounded by the lack of diversity in terms of the host, the architects, and the people shown in the televisual representation of the architectural office. But equally, home is always stand-alone or semi-detached, and the occupant owns the home; other ways of living together are not considered. This limitation reinforces the dominant aspiration of a single-family dwelling in market-led economies (Jarvis 2013). In the first two series, the white nuclear family living in their renovated home, becomes part of the shared orientation toward the family, home ownership, and the promise of happiness. Thus, reaffirmed through Your Home are normative associations of social and spatial norms generating a reassuring world view of happiness and home, and as a conventional route of happiness (Ahmed 2010, 115), which rests on ideas of who is worthy and capable of being happy “in the right way” (2010, 13).

In the third series of Your Home, five new architects are introduced, only Laura from the original series remains. The architects are more diverse with two men of color, shifting us from the figure of the white male architect (Cheng 2010). The clients are more diverse as well, with one episode following a single mother. Even the people in the background shots of the staged architectural studio are more diverse. The change is dramatic and addresses a chronic underrepresentation of diversity in property TV. Your Home’s non-stereotypical representations can potentially change the viewers’ perceptions of home, who can be at home, and who can belong. While diversity itself becomes a happy point on the show, Your Home also mitigates this in several ways. The show does not attend to the material structures of home that shape and produce difference (Banet-Weiser 2007; Butler 2013; Nakamura 2008). Structural inequalities are covered over by happiness of a VR reveal, where the focus is still on people who own homes. The show does not deal with who has easier access to obtain a home, the deeper problem of housing precarity, or the limited options for collective living (Ahmed 2012, 910; Benjamin 2019). Ahmed (2012) warns against the easy adoption of diversity as a point of difference in commercial programing that does not signal structural inequalities. Your Home actually aims to cover over housing precarity; but, housing precarity is not felt the same –in the UK, for example, it is harder for Black households to access mortgages “compared to White households with similar characteristics” (Alper and Molyneux 2017: 253). Moreover, each show’s episodes conclude with a celebration of the social and spatial norm of the family at home, even without the clients’ children. As such, Your Home closes the doors to community and commingling with others – as if the owners are not part of a larger or diverse community (Cf. White 2013).

The home that Your Home celebrates is a place of the nuclear family shut off from social context. Your Home neglects collaboration and community where we do not see other ways we could live together, rather it makes visible individuality, prosperity, privacy, and self-government. There are no multigenerational households or co-housing options that celebrate transforming family patterns and living aside from one single-parent household (Budgeon and Roseneil 2004; Törnqvist 2019). Single, multigenerational, or co-housing, fall out of the remit of a visualized citizenship (Bell and Binnie 2000). Alternative ways of living, such as forging connections through cooking, washing and various activities with people outside of the family unit, are outside of the default subjectivity, where such invisibility denies the politicized nature of the couple who occupy a stand-alone or semi-detached home. The walls of the home are more than background; they are also generative of a desire to contain, protect, and integrate the promised sovereignty, which is circulated back to the audience through uplifting and happy emotions (Duffy and Hund 2015; Marwick 2013; van Dijck 2013). The happy emotions tell us who can “take up” space, and which bodies feel at home (Ahmed 2007, 153). We are arguing here that the presence and absence of diversity of social and spatial norms has political consequences. It is also critical to speak of the symbolic annihilation of alternative ways of living and sharing space in the media. Your Home is another vehicle of control working to sustain affective attachment to the dream of a home within a framework of home ownership and happiness. The show further affirms the “rightness” of this dominant way of life, a life to which many struggle to conform (Ahmed 2010, 2).

Conclusion

This paper looks specifically at how VR enacts a grounding of home through happiness and uplifting emotions, creating specific attachments between people and place. Your Home offers a critical lens through which to view the profession and the image of architecture. By projecting the home materially through VR, architectural visualization is made accessible through an immersive televisual home experience – tangible, real, with physical properties, texture and color –in contrast to the thinness of traditional and more technical architectural plans and sections. Through VR, the audience is drawn to, orientated toward, and connected to the show and its promise: the architect and the architectural professional are represented to be more ordinary, accessible, and caring, a shift from the historical image of the creative and uncaring architect. Both VR visualization and the relationship to the architect are situated as “happy objects,” orientating the viewer toward the home—the ideal home.

Moreover, as part of the televisual experience and through “happy objects” of the VR reveal, Your Home deflects anxieties of housing precarity and growing wealth disparity, focusing the viewer on the joy of the design reveal rather than concrete reality. Finally, home as a familiar sentiment is brought closer—more intimate and accessible—through Your Home, persuasively circulating social and spatial norms. The show’s success resides in unpacking the forms of experiences and relations of power that mark the building process – challenging the circuits of power allowing the boundary around who does and does not belong in this world of architecture to shift. Your Home shows how these long-standing categories of difference between architect and client can be readdressed, as it plays off the notion of a wholly good life achieved through a promise of a realist visualization of architecture. However, it is a narrow vision of family and home, stabilized through happiness – a common-sense understanding of home, while simultaneously reinforcing regressive ideas of identity and home.