Aspirations of home making in the nursing home

In the Netherlands, individual nursing homes as well as national policies have expressed the aspiration to make the nursing home more homely. In this chapter we discuss three ways in which home and institution emerge in the space of a nursing home. First, we illustrate how access, autonomy and control over space are negotiated. Second, we show how objects associated with the home or the institution are made differentially visible and invisible. Third, we turn to everyday routines to show the attempts to align rhythms of familiarity and rhythms of efficiency. These attempts at home making demonstrate that the institutional character of the nursing home cannot be made altogether invisible: it remains a site with its own logic, where the integration of spheres within its walls requires ongoing reflection, debates and efforts. Home is constantly in flux, and it is hard work to relate the public to the private.