The Perfect Home

06 May, 2006 by The_Boss

Channel 4 Saturday May 6 2006 7:10pm to 9:10pm

This three-part series is a guide, written and presented by Alain de Botton, to some of the central principles of architecture, connecting the seemingly small dilemmas we all face about how to decorate and design our houses to the big philosophical questions:
What is beauty and how much does it matter? How do the buildings we live in shape the people we can be?
And above all: how do we want to live?

Alain de Botton goes in search of answers to our housing crisis, and comes up with some suggestions for the perfect home: a kind of architecture that can make us happy.

He suggests that most new houses are built in appalling taste, and that with a housing deficit of around a million homes, this country urgently needs to wake up to the merits of good design.

If we can say that Bob Dylan is better than Barry Manilow, why not accept that when it comes to visual tastes, all views aren't equal either? It's not that the newly design-conscious, IKEA-shopping classes aren't worrying too much about their houses: on the contrary, they're not thinking about the issues at stake deeply enough.

Alain focuses on the point that make-over shows merely circle around superficially: that our environments determine how we feel; that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places. He suggests how we might learn to build better, more attractive dwellings, in which we would stand a higher chance of happiness.

By the end of the programme, we'll have some answers to the perennially troubling question of how our environment might look. We'll have come a little closer to an answer of what a perfect home could be.

Prod/ Dir: Neil Crombie; Prod Co: Seneca Productions Ltd