investing in enchantment: memory, market, and the family vacation home

Should we keep the family cabin or list it on Airbnb? U.S. second homes are formally classified as investment properties used primarily for financial gain or vacation homes primarily reserved for personal use, but what have families actually been doing with them before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns?

Today’s desire for authenticity and family connectedness has made family vacation homes a compelling site to examine how we think of labor and leisure, whom we include as family members and neighbors, and how all of this is represented both spatially and materially. Framed as a magical place for family members to look back on nostalgically, the family vacation home remains an enchanted and memory-filled site that is artificially removed from the marketplace, even if it is rented to others for their family vacations. It is meant to be a magical escape from the challenges of work and family stress, politics, and social inequalities. In reality, the family vacation home requires labor, has financial value as a piece of family wealth, and the magic is not accessible to all. In Investing in Enchantment, Michelle Janning tells a new story about the cultural meanings and structural outcomes surrounding family vacation homes today.

Michelle Janning is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her teaching and advising, is situated primarily within sociology of family, education, and material culture, but also includes interdisciplinary courses on homes, childhoods, popular culture, design, and community studies.

Janning has written or edited numerous articles, chapters, and books about everyday family life, intimate relationships, material culture, design, and the digital and spatial geographies of social inequalities. These include The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (Rowman & Littlefield 2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (Routledge2018), Contemporary Parenting and Parenthood: From News Headlines to New Research (Praeger/ABC-CLIO 2019) (editor), and A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers (Routledge 2023).