Beyond McMansions and green homes : thinking household sustainability through materialities of homeyness

An increasing volume of research demonstrates the ways in which the possibilities and pitfalls of household sustainability are connected to materialities and imaginaries of home. Household energy and water use, for example, are undeniably informed by and constitute cultures of home, whether through cultures of comfort that underpin technology and energy use (Shove 2003), aesthetics and dispositions that shape water use in gardens (Askew and McGuirk 2004, Moran 2008), or the connections between cleanliness, class and water use (Sofoulis 2005)). This chapter is positioned within this broad literature, and takes it in three new directions. Firstly, our conceptual entry point is that of materialities of ‘homeyness’. Drawing on the early work of Grant McCracken and more recent work on materialities of home, we are interested in the practices, objects, consumption patterns and energy use associated with making houses homey: conforting, welcoming and, often, unpretentious. In the first section of this chapter, therefore, we outline the notion of homeyness and its possible connections with sustainable and unsustainable practices. Secondly, we take the literature on home, households and sustainability as a focus for a site that is popularly considered to be the epitome of unsustainability: ‘McMansions’, or large, new dwellings located on the fringes of Sydney