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Living Rooms
'Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living...'
In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.
Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.
In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?
About the author
Sam Johnson-Schlee is an academic and writer living by the sea in North Essex. He writes non-fiction and memoir about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is interested in how paying attention to familiar objects and practices can open up new perspectives on the world we live in. Living Rooms is his first book.
In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our homes, and their underlying reality.
Living Rooms blends history, theory, and memoir as it moves between the colonial trade in house plants, Proustian reminiscence, and razor-sharp critique of rentier capitalism. Johnson-Schlee suggests that, by looking closely at the places where we live, we can confront political realities that extend out into the world.
In the way we furnish our homes, might we be unconsciously imagining a different kind of life? In the way we arrange our sofas, picture frames, and our pot plants, are we dreaming of a better world? And what would it mean to reject the notion that a house should be a commodity, and to embrace the idea of a truly living room?
About the author
Sam Johnson-Schlee is an academic and writer living by the sea in North Essex. He writes non-fiction and memoir about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is interested in how paying attention to familiar objects and practices can open up new perspectives on the world we live in. Living Rooms is his first book.
- GenresNonfictionEssays
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 10, 2022
11 people are currently reading
460 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 14, 2025
Dit boek lag al twee jaar te wachten tot ik verder dan hoofdstuk drie las, ik kocht het puur op cover - nu pas was de tijd rijp om Living Rooms ook effectief uit te lezen. Sam Johnson-Schlee schreef een boeiende en vermakelijke reeks essays (of is het een detective?) over de illusie van de ideale thuis, over de droom van de woonkamer en hoe we die doorheen de geschiedenis inrichtten. Hij schrijft over de perfecte zucht van een donzen kussen, de invloed van kapitalisme en IKEA op onze woning, bespreekt o.a. Walter Benjamin, Freud en Sherlock Holmes en het belang van het huis in Parasite (die perfecte film uit 2019). Verder las ik ook nog over Louis Daguerre, Roland Barthes, over de oorsprong van ‘Live, laugh, love’ en hoe dekentjes en herinneringen aan het huis van onze grootouders ons helpen te overleven. Wat een plezier, dit boek. Aanrader.
October 12, 2023
4,5
Wonderfully freewheeling and associative essays about the meaning of interiors, the hidden life of house plants, the politics of quilts, the revolutionary potential of wallpaper, the symbolism of the sofa, etc etc. Johnson-Schlee argues that the home is the place where we try to escape the capitalist rat race, while at the same time trapping us and binding us to that rat race (having to pay our mortgages). It is a place that creates an illusion of self-sufficiency, but also, a place where the threads become visible with which we are connected to other people, this vast "web of interdependency".
Wonderfully freewheeling and associative essays about the meaning of interiors, the hidden life of house plants, the politics of quilts, the revolutionary potential of wallpaper, the symbolism of the sofa, etc etc. Johnson-Schlee argues that the home is the place where we try to escape the capitalist rat race, while at the same time trapping us and binding us to that rat race (having to pay our mortgages). It is a place that creates an illusion of self-sufficiency, but also, a place where the threads become visible with which we are connected to other people, this vast "web of interdependency".
January 2, 2023
delayed review but i recommended this to seven different people i hadnt met before and one that i had over christmas new year as a natural result of our conversation & therefore i assess it as really good and brings people together 🫡
January 4, 2024
Cheap marxism and psychoanalysis that seems only to be used to explain man child behaviour
January 16, 2026
read on sunny january day with cheese and pickle sandwich in hand, long live excess long may we remember we are tied to eachother
May 30, 2024
Lovee the pointers for further research. As interior nerd and no 1 defender of rambly political and personal essays I officially recommend.
Read
July 11, 2024Some interesting ideas but you should be allowed to enjoy house plants and nice things.
Seems like he’s a bit detached from less affluent households who often have second hand stuff of the kind he’s talking about. Unfortunately not all of us can go to John Lewis and kit out our house like he can.
Seems like he’s a bit detached from less affluent households who often have second hand stuff of the kind he’s talking about. Unfortunately not all of us can go to John Lewis and kit out our house like he can.
January 19, 2023
Certainly some things I've never thought about before, although I felt some of the points were rather forced.
January 12, 2025
“We ought to demand to be buried beneath the floorboards of our rented accommodation — to haunt the landlords forever.” In Living Rooms, an expansive essay on homemaking, decorating, and interior spaces by Sam Johnson-Schlee, is a compelling, gorgeously crafted tribute to the beauty of the home, its personal reverberations, its political significance, and the confluence of both in the home as a site for conjuring one’s dream life. A chapter on ‘Chintz’ moves from the colonial legacy of chintz to the late-twentieth-century decline of socialism and William Morris interiors, heralded by New Labour, and on to the bourgeois denigration of doilies and lacework as it became attainable to the working class. Later, a chapter on ‘House Plants’ covers memory and the lack of meaningful marks that characterises rented living, as well as the ideal of show homes and the parable of the house in Bong Joon-ho’s *Parasite*. Elsewhere, he makes a surprisingly convincing defence of ‘live laugh love’ that very nearly makes me regret mocking my mother’s décor choices. The other chapters take velvet, house plants and blankets (“Blankets hold you without a person there to hold you.”) as their starting points to explore deeper themes, from the still life to childhood idealism to family in general. In fact, family recurs beautifully in the essay not just as a theme but as an organising principle, points of reference and characters in the personal narrative running through all the theory + history. Johnson-Schlee’s rallying cry against capitalism and landlording is satisfying and prescient, couched in his luxurious prose: “In the living room there is a kind of dreaming.”
January 26, 2026
Wonderful!
“Like a dream, a home is both individual and collective, its intimacy is drawn from its privacy and also the relations from which it stems. Allowing the home to be a commodity is not a gift of wealth but an impoverishment.
The job of a responsible capitalist is to stop every tendril from entering their masonry, to ensure that life leaves no trace. How much more would we have if our homes could extend out into the world, truly alive; if we could set our roots down into the foundations beyond the hard-edged containers that some have been able to eke out as possessions and others are forced to shelter within for a fee.
Were it possible to visualise all the lines of relationship that extend out of the interior and into the world, then we would see the violence of severing such connections in order to protect the value of these commodities.”
“Like a dream, a home is both individual and collective, its intimacy is drawn from its privacy and also the relations from which it stems. Allowing the home to be a commodity is not a gift of wealth but an impoverishment.
The job of a responsible capitalist is to stop every tendril from entering their masonry, to ensure that life leaves no trace. How much more would we have if our homes could extend out into the world, truly alive; if we could set our roots down into the foundations beyond the hard-edged containers that some have been able to eke out as possessions and others are forced to shelter within for a fee.
Were it possible to visualise all the lines of relationship that extend out of the interior and into the world, then we would see the violence of severing such connections in order to protect the value of these commodities.”
July 23, 2024
Short read, but a thoroughly enjoyable freewheel through a series of living rooms and their inhabitants. At times very moving, and culminates in a fun interweaving of stories at the end.
June 22, 2025
Non fiction
October 27, 2023
I enjoyed parts of this, other parts felt like a little bit of a stretch I thought. I liked most of his associations and connections though, I thought they were pretty well done.
July 9, 2023
Lil forced
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews