Writing from home

A guest essay by Katie McCrory

There are some books you read that seem to burrow under the ribcage and find their way deep inside, where the heart is. That’s how I felt reading Katie McCrory’s deeply felt and richly researched non-fiction read about home, called – appropriately – Where the Heart Is.

A proof copy was sent to me in my role as editor of Country Homes & Interiors magazine, but it was in my guise as creator of The Coach House that I took out my highlighter and began marking passages and turning the corners of pages so I could easily find them. Katie writes about the frequent, disconcerting disconnect between where we feel most at home and where we actually live (one in three people feel more at home in places other than where they live). She explores the emotional states that make us feel ‘at home’ and those that make us feel out of place. This passage really struck home for me:

I was struck by what appears to be the domestication of shame, in that a lot of its branches extend from the spaces and places where we have lived. How many of us have found ourselves thinking, ‘My home is not big enough / clean enough / beautiful enough / good enough?’ Katie McCrory

I’d read Katie’s work, unknowingly, before this. She leads IKEA’s annual Life at Home Report – a fantastic global investigation into how we live, think and experience home across cultures and countries. It’s this background that makes Where the Heart Is such a compelling read, as Katie fuses her own sense of home and her personal domestic evolution with the insights she gains outside, from her world of work.

But what is it like to bring the heartland of home to life in a book, while also navigating family, relationships, oh, and a day job? In this fantastic guest essay, Katie shares how Where the Heart Is came to be, from book deal to its recent launch at Daunt Books in London.

Thank you so much to Katie for sharing this with The Coach House.

• Order Where the Heart Is

• Read Katie’s Substack, Life at Home

  

Writing from Home
By Katie McCrory

I was just a few weeks postpartum with my second child when I confirmed the deal for my debut book, Where the Heart Is. The idea for this book had sat with me for many years until I finally decided to take a proper crack at it, quite precisely at the point when I realised I was pregnant. Writing the proposal, finding a literary agent, going out on submission – it all took place whilst I tracked kicks, went for scans, had blood drawn, and slowly lost sight of my feet. The book and the baby came from the same place at the same time, deep within me. I came to realise I could not deliver one without the other.

For the last 10 or so years, whilst I’ve been growing my family, I’ve been leading the world’s largest and most distinctive piece of research into home at IKEA. The many things I’ve learned along the way have transformed my understanding and experience of what creates a ‘good’ life at home. To view your own life through the lens of a research study can reveal many things, if you are willing to see. Above all, sitting with this particular vantage point helps me explain the way I feel about home and ask for what I need. After 25+ house moves across four countries, it’s only now that I understand what I’m looking for when I walk through my front door.

For a long time, I wanted to write a book that mapped this homemaking journey into the landscape of the global research, and I wanted to feature solutions that didn’t require any home furnishing or design knowledge or any of the costs that seem to come with what tastemakers will have you believe is the ‘ideal’ home. In fact, I wanted to flip the very notion of ideal on its head. I wanted an emotional counterpoint to the gravitational pull of home aesthetics and interiors’ trends that all too often place form and function over feeling. I knew, from the research, that there are eight distinct emotional needs which create what we call the ‘feeling of home’, and it’s these needs that ultimately became the spine of the book as I plotted my way through different homemaking chapters from my childhood onwards. But I soon found that my own journey wasn’t over.

As I contemplated bringing a second child home from the hospital, I was confronted with several intractable cultural expectations about what a ‘family home’ should look like. Somewhere with your own front door, bedrooms for everyone, more than one toilet, and a lovely little garden. By contrast, we lived in an apartment up four flights of stairs, with two bedrooms, a shared courtyard, and rats in the basement. On paper, it was obvious that we needed to move. But we don’t live on paper – we live in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood, and heart and mind. Suddenly, my own book became my salvation. When we brought our baby son home to meet his delighted big sister, I started writing my way through 65,000 words that became Where the Heart Is and finally brought me home, right where I was.

A few very well-intentioned people gently suggested I was biting off more than I could chew, caring for a newborn and writing a book at the same time, but I couldn’t have done it any other way. The solutions I include throughout the book were born out of necessity, tried and tested in a constantly shifting life at home that had me at my wits’ end whilst simultaneously cracking open with love. I wrote a lot of the manuscript out and about whilst my baby napped, waiting for his heavy lids to close so I could whip out my laptop and pick up where I left off, no matter if I was conveniently situated in a cafe, or a less favourable park bench or supermarket. But I always returned home, in body and mind, and wrote from a place of true presence to the way my own life there was constantly shifting. This process healed many of my long-held insecurities, like the shame I had about the small size of our home that stretched all the way from my childhood. The day we moved our son into his sister’s room was the day I finally accepted that the footprint of my home was not a proxy for the footprint of my life.

Now my newborn is a rambunctious almost-two-year-old, tearing around our home like he owns the place. And he does, in every kind of deep and meaningful way you could hope for beyond just your name on a piece of paper. I still use the solutions from my book to navigate this new season of my life at home, and I hope that if you pick up a copy, they’ll help you through every season of yours, too. What I ultimately learned in the writing of this book is that life at home doesn’t have a finish line; there’s no trophy for your mantle when you’re done. There’s just this day, and the next, and the knowledge that when change comes – as it invariably does – there’s no better place than home to help you find your way. It’s where the heart is, after all.

WHERE THE HEART IS: Eight Ways to Transform Your Life at Home, No Matter Where You Live (Transworld, 2026) is available for pre-order and out from 19 February.

Katie McCrory is an author and researcher. She has written and spoken extensively about life at home around the world and across different platforms, and she publishes a popular weekly newsletter with readers from over 40 countries, called Life at Home.

Katie has lived in the UK, the US and Denmark, having moved home upward of 25 times. Today she lives in Copenhagen with her husband, two young children, and their enormous cat.