Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article explores the complex relationship between the home as a site of self-expression, systems of taste, and the property market, by drawing on data from home-lifestyle television and online home improvement forums. There are competing forces which both engender and undermine aesthetic self-expression in the home. It is impacted upon by the recent popularity of do-it-yourself home improvement practices, which operate at the tension between self-expression and market demands. Competing demands and concerns over appropriate forms of domestic self-expression may result in a form of taste anxiety, which is fueled by capital and lifestyle media experts. Yet such media, in conjunction with the property industry, also seek to ease taste anxiety by promoting a marketable interior design style I term “soft-modernism.” In addition, increased trends of tenure mobility may hinder self-expression through the emergence of a moral geography based on the need to consider future owners, yet this neo-liberal “residential ethics” may ultimately pay financial dividends.
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