House as Home - To Make A House A Home by Jane and Lesley Davison

Nowadays many people talk about houses as investments and advise buyers not to get emotional about the home buying process. While I'm happy to work with buyers seeking to aquire real estate solely for its investment value, the truth is, buying a home to live in often is about emotions.

After all, when you buy a house to make it your home, you're charting the course for you and your family and friends. This house will be the place where you celebrate holidays, where your memories are formed, the place you come home to. The good and the bad - this will be where it happens for however long you live in your home. Your home will be your haven.

You'll care for your house. You'll put your own stamp on it. Inside and out you'll make it your own. And the house will make its mark on you. For ever after, the house will play a role in all your memories of the years you lived there.

To Make A House A Home: Four Generations of American Women and the Houses They Lived In by Jane Davison and Lesley Davison is a fascinating look at the central role that our homes play in our lives and how our view of home has changed through several generations.

To Make A House A Home is a 1994 reworking of the 1980 book The Fall of a Doll's House by Jane Davison. Davison's daughter Lesley has added vintage illustrations throughout the book and chapters of her own including "Generation of Renters, 1980 - 1994". That's a generation I can relate to as it closely mirrors my own renting years before I was able to finally buy my first house.

The book is part social history and commentary, part local memoir and history (Jane Davison grew up in Summit, New Jersey and lived in Cambridge and Boston in the 1960s and 1970s), and is greatly shaped by Jane Davison's feminist viewpoint. Publisher's Weekly described the earlier version of the book as a "classic history of the love-hate relationship between the American housewife and her place of residence." Lesley Davison's additions update her mother's viewpoints and the vintage photographs of people and their homes are priceless.

The chapters about Cambridge in the sixties and early seventies, are great fun to read for a look at Cambridge before real estate values went wild. My parents are of Jane Davison's generation but chose the suburbs when they bought their first house though my father had grown up in Cambridge. Many a time my mother has remarked "If only I knew about Cambridge and we had bought there instead" as young newlyweds. Instead my early experience of home were formed in the suburbs of Medfield and Concord and it was an adult that I moved to the city. Who would I be had I grown up in Cambridge? Somebody slightly different - or very different - I think. Where we live changes who we are and who we become in ways both subtle and significant.

To Make A House of Home is out of print but available online or at your local used bookstore.

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My bookcases are filled to overflowing with books - many of them about houses, real estate, and local history - I collect books about anyplace I've lived so have shelves lined with books about Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, Concord, New Haven, New Hampshire and New England. Some of the books, many in fact, are out of print but many are of interest to those who sell houses, who love houses, or who are hoping to buy a house and want to know more about the history of a community. I'll be regularly featuring books from my shelves in future posts.