When you arrive in a foreign city and walk into your hotel room, what’s the first thing you do…?
I unpack, others might make a call home, plug in their computer, turn on the telly to see what’s on, or scavenge through the mini bar for a familiar snack. The interesting thing is that at some point early on, we all make a connection home.
‘Home’ was the topic of Nudiversity this month, but more specifically how we make a sense of home when we’re away from it.
Claire McEwan, who recently finished her thesis on the topic, researched four Bosnian women, who fled the violent conflict within the former Yugoslavia in 1992. Her interest was in how each of the women has gone about re-making a sense of home in their new home, Australia.
Concepts of home and place from an anthropological perspective used to be geographically fixed. Now however, it is much more fluid. Claire argued that home can be any space that you make familiar, be it the photographs you hang up, the comfort food you cook, even the way you fold your clothes and nestle them in a hotel room closet. It’s up to the creativity of the individual.
Some brands have cushioned onto the idea in a simple way, like Sofitel’s MyBed. A luxurious bed that supposedly gives you a sleeping experience like the one you’d have if you were at home.
It challenged me to consider all the things that make me feel at home and how I can apply that to others. It’s all the mobile qualities - the card trick you know like the back of your hand, the musical instrument that you keep close in times of sadness and that old time favourite movie you still laugh at whenever you play it. They’re all distant memories, not forgotten. Memories that we draw on and interact with when we want to establish a sense of place or home.
If there is a role for a brand to play here, first it’s about understanding that there are many products people look for and interact with that give each individual a sense of familiarity and comfort. Second, it’s about realising that the richer understanding may lie in identifying the things that are transportable, that we take with us, savour in our memories and pull out when we’re ready to create a place called home.
If only Sofitel could get my real bed next time…!
