The Perfect Home
Premieres Friday, April 4 at 10 pm
In a series of three programs, writer 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. Alain 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. 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 makeover 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 series, 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.