Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterised as evidencing an ‘eclectic’ approach towards design styles and promoting a ‘lifestyle’ attitude towards domestic interiors. In an attempt to fill-out these two terms and to explore the elusive (and allusive) content of Habitat’s ‘eclectic lifestyle’ this article analyses the domestic scenography that is presented in three arenas of display that can be seen as being authored by Habitat: the shops themselves; the annual catalogues; and the advice books that were published under the authorship of Terence Conran and promoted and sold by Habitat (but also available more widely). I suggest that one way of recognising the affective content of Habitat’s scenographic imagination is to grasp it as constituting a genre that incorporates variety yet also mobilises a particular set of domestic promises
