What makes somewhere feel like home?
An address is a location. Feeling at home often involves memory, familiarity, people, culture and whether a place welcomes us.
Published 24 October 2026 · Last evidence review 24 October 2026 · OASYS Editorial
Some places have a floorboard you know will creak.
You know where the afternoon light falls and which cupboard contains the mugs. You can recognise somebody coming through the door before they say hello.
Then there are places you have never lived in, where you nevertheless feel unexpectedly at ease.
A friend's kitchen. A relative's house. A neighbourhood from years ago.
Why doesn't the feeling of home always follow our official address?
Beyond the postcode
Environmental psychologists study place attachment, the meaningful connections people develop with particular settings.
Scannell and Gifford (2010) proposed a model with three dimensions: the person, the psychological processes involved and the place itself. It brings together individual or group meaning, emotions and memories, behaviour, and the characteristics of an environment.
A building can shelter someone without making them feel they belong. Another place may remain important long after they leave it.
A familiar street can carry memories even after the shop has changed its name and the houses have been repainted.
More than one home
Moving between places can complicate the question of home. Somebody might know two languages, two sets of routines and two ways of being welcomed—or excluded.
In research with visitors to a Chinese community centre in north-west England, Wood and Martin (2020) examined how memories of former homelands remained connected to identity and belonging.
These are particular people's experiences, not a claim that all migrants feel alike. They do show why home cannot always be reduced to a single location or an instruction to “settle in”.
Belonging is affected by the world around us
Feeling at home isn't only about adopting a better attitude.
Housing insecurity, discrimination, accessibility and exclusion can alter whether a place feels safe or welcoming.
Geographer Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds (2006) examines Black women's geographies and how space is shaped by power, inequality and resistance. It is critical geographical scholarship, not an experimental study of a wellbeing technique. It contributes an essential distinction: the places we inhabit are not neutral containers.
We cannot reasonably ask somebody to feel at home without attending to the circumstances that affect their belonging.
Making a place meaningful
Sometimes a new place becomes familiar little by little.
You learn a quieter route, recognise someone at the shop or begin to know where the sun catches a wall in the morning.
Sometimes it does not happen, and that is not a personal failure. People have different resources and experiences.
Perhaps a better question than “Where should I feel at home?” is “What has helped a place feel meaningful or welcoming to me?”
Maybe it's a person, a language, a smell from a kitchen or a view from a window.
Home is not always where we were born. Not necessarily where we live now. And not always just one place.
References
- Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2010). Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.09.006
- Wood, N., & Martin, D. (2020). “I'm a foreigner there”: Landscape, wellbeing and the geographies of home. Health & Place, 62, 102274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.102274
- McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press.