The home from attic to cellar

This study is based on 96 in-depth interviews with the inhabitants of rural and urban environments in France. It aims at ascertaining the importance of attics and cellars as hidden spaces of the home and to describe the uses and experiences they elicit. The thematic analysis shows that hidden spaces are never disconnected from the daily lived-in interior spaces of the home, which is thus experienced as a whole. Beyond the negatively connoted emotions associated with these places, attics and cellars are shelters allowing appropriation, accumulation and security, and signify time. They provide space for the experience of secrecy, considered as the basis for the assertion of self identity.