What Makes a Place Feel Like Home?
What makes a place feel like home?
A flood of one-word answers come to mind, all beginning with F, strangely: family, friendships, familiarity. Food. Some of these things travel better than others. If you find me a slice of my mom’s apple pie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, I would feel at least a little at home just about anywhere. But the question has become a much deeper and multifaceted thing as my life has become more complex, and more independent of family, friends, and, regrettably, foods that are beyond my culinary ability. Suddenly several places, many places even, feel like home. And places that used to feel that way feel anything but. Ultimately, I don't think home is produced by any one ingredient or combination of ingredients. It can’t be, or some new and unexpected places in my life wouldn’t qualify.
At 23 years old I have experienced the complete life-cycle of a home. My birth into it, my graduation from it, and, unfortunately, my aversion to it now. Through this process a new home was born, several, in fact, though I mourn the old one. Having lived through a lot of change in recent years and having somehow found myself “at home” in a host of new places, I have become very curious, both personally and professionally, in this almost mystical process that seems to defy categorical explanation.
When I speak of my childhood home I am referring to my Grandfather’s mountain ranch where my siblings and I grew up. I spent 20 years there and it certainly felt like home. After I moved away it still felt like home, and I visited frequently. Then, suddenly, it ceased feeling like home when my family found out around Thanksgiving they would have to move away. The circumstances surrounding that move were painful and divisive for my family, particularly for my father. Rather than revisit those events in detail, I mention them only because they marked the moment the ranch began to feel fundamentally different. In the span of a conversation it stopped feeling like home.
Prior to Thanksgiving the ranch absolutely felt like my home. Arguably, it was the only place that truly felt like home. It felt like home because my family was still living there, yes, but it felt like home for a million other reasons. It felt like home because I knew precisely where everything was, down to my favorite Phillips-head screwdriver. It felt like home because I had actually worked on so many things there, scraped my knuckles and skinned my knees. It felt like home because my mom had taken advantage of her carte blanche on paint colors to paint the garage doors burnt orange, don’t ask me why. After that Thanksgiving the ranch stopped feeling like home. Even before anyone moved I walked on eggshells when I visited. I still knew where everything was, I was still working on this and that, and the garage doors were still orange, but I was no longer at home.
When my family moved in March, whatever sense of home remained seemed to leave with them. The few times since that I have visited I feel increasingly alienated from a place that fundamentally shaped the person I have become. More and more things have moved. Fewer and fewer of the buildings are as I remember them. And you can bet Mom’s garage doors have not remained burnt orange. I’ve not yet mustered the fortitude to revisit my childhood bedroom. It is a strange, unpleasant, sad feeling which I have probably spent too much time dwelling on but has largely provided the genesis for this essay.
Somehow, in the course of growing up I guess, other places have begun to feel as much like home as anywhere. My apartment feels like home, especially since we finally got around to hanging some marked-down Hobby Lobby prints on the living room walls. We even bought a clock! Oh, and we have a cat now as well. My mom’s apartments, both of the ones she’s had since a year ago March, very quickly began to feel like home. This was perhaps the most unexpected development of all, and I still don't know how it happened so fast. The handful of desks and rooms I routinely occupy at MSU Denver have even, strangely, begun to feel like home. If my hypothesis involved a magic formula for home-building I think this eclectic mix of places and circumstances would thoroughly disprove that. I struggle to find a nice common denominator.
In July I visited the summer camp where I had previously spent two summers on staff. I made a point to do as little as possible, to enjoy the peace and quiet, and to catch up with some friends from the year before. I got exactly what I wanted. Five hours rocking on the porch of Columbine Lodge was just what the doctor ordered. I probably got more time alone than I bargained for because it was everyone else’s day off and they chose to go into town. So there I sat, alone for most of the afternoon. To my surprise and delight, I truly felt as at home as if I were sitting on the deck with my dad while he supervised the barbeque grill. I cannot possibly convey the emotional gravity of that experience, nor could I understand it myself, but it has stuck with me for months now. Sure, I lived on-site for a summer, but that was back in 2021. Last year I was a traveling program director and only spent 4 weeks on-site. I rarely visit. I have, sadly, lost touch with nearly everybody that I worked with. Yet there I was, sitting on the rocking swing where I had written my father’s eulogy the year before, feeling as though virtually no time had passed.
Feeling utterly blissful, totally at peace. At home.
Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp is, undoubtedly, a special place for me and many others, but when I left in August of 2021 and again in 2025, I did not expect any of my return trips to feel any more nostalgic than a trip to my elementary school. Certainly a visit to Marshdale Elementary would bring back a flood of memories, but no 23 year old man should feel totally at home wandering the halls of his 5th grade alma mater unless he is a professional educator. You simply age out of some things. I thought I had aged out of RTLC I guess. Turns out you don't age out of rocking on porch swings in the mountains, and I hope I don’t age out of RTLC. But what made it feel so much like home? And I truly mean that in the fullest sense, as much as the ranch ever felt like home.
In part it was that I could see places at camp where I had “left a part of myself behind” both metaphorically and, regrettably, in the form of blood, sweat, and tears. I remember spending the hours between 10:00PM and 1:00AM crawling around the attic of Eagle Peak lodge, blowing cellulose insulation into every crack and crevice which caused the hundred-year-old building to be so darn drafty at night. I remember sitting up late on the deck outside Bristlecone having some really hard conversations with a friend. I remember the horribly uncomfortable case of mid-thigh rope burn I took down from the high ropes course following a poor selection of shorts. Maybe a part of my magic formula hypothesis had been proven true. But the considerably greater amount that I have “left behind” at the ranch is not enough to overcome its sudden deflation as a mythic place in my mind, nor have I exactly left an indelible mark on either of my mom’s recent apartments. One of those places feels like home today and it isn’t the one where I earned all my scars.
Fundamentally, I had to get to the bottom of why I so suddenly stopped feeling at home on the ranch if I wanted to understand the wonderful and opposite feeling I experienced at camp in July. Most obviously, I do not have any remotely traumatic or even many unpleasant memories at RTLC (other than the rope burn). That earns some points in its column, sure, but it didn’t explain the whole picture. The total picture is most accurately painted with this strange phrase that came to mind weeks later; I knew I was home because I knew who I was. Not in the sense of title - I wasn’t even a volunteer that week - but I was so overwhelmed by security and peace in my identity that I stopped thinking about it. I didn’t realize how rare that was until I returned home and found myself constantly preoccupied with what other people might be thinking about me. Even though it is just a tiny whisper in the back of my head, it can crack the foundation of an otherwise sound identity.
I think that is what makes home. It is the total environment, but most importantly it is the quiet certainty that you belong there. When the people open their arms to you and refuse to cross them, when the place agrees that you belong because you’ve already left pieces of yourself behind, and when being still for days at a time refreshes the soul, then you are home. It is simultaneously more portable and durable than I expected, and more delicate than I realized.
Unfortunately, this slippery, insubstantial, ethereal thing can’t be wrapped neatly and presented as a finished product. Home cannot be manufactured. It cannot be poured in concrete, machined from aluminum, or molded from plastic. No cleverly assembled CMF package can be imbued with this intangible thing and we must acknowledge this. Home emerges from experience. It is nurtured through the development of shared history. It is made mature in the struggles undertaken together, the stinging defeats and the triumphant victories, and the repeated reconciliations to one another.
I don’t think it is possible for any designer to create “home”. It grows too organically, like a plant which sprouts up from the soil. Nevertheless, I believe we are called, as caretakers, designers, planners, and creators, to cultivate places where it has the opportunity to grow. Perhaps the best we can do is tend the garden and let the seeds of community take root as they will.
