This book examines how a household should be the center of daily life where relationships thrive through shared work and leisure, and offers principles for such a home today as the answer to widespread unhappiness and isolation.

Cuddeback invokes timeless wisdom to address this crisis of our time. He focuses on eight simple principles lived across cultures and epochs, and shows how they give concrete direction for crafting the household—and the life—we naturally crave for ourselves and our loved ones.

While more people are discovering that good work in the home is a key to family life - witness the explosion of ‘homesteading’ - now finally someone explains the truth behind it—and the corresponding but less obvious importance of good leisure. Utilizing great thinkers from all ages, Cuddeback deftly shows the profound wisdom behind the natural outlines of the relationships and activities of home life. With care and clarity, he grounds the practical cornerstones of home life in the perennial principles of human nature and ethics.

We do need to rediscover those principles to shape a good household, and to give it a uniquely contemporary spin. Today’s household will necessarily be an intentional household, one crafted in view of what really matters: the true happiness of human persons.