17 Best Metaphors for Home (A to Z List)

A metaphor for home explains your feelings about your home by using figurative language.

Examples include:

• My home is my castle
• My home is a retreat

You’d need to think of something your home reminds you of: a zoo, a swamp, a castle, or a zen retreat. Then, you can say your home is a zoo (or a swamp or a classroom, or whatever!) in order to create the perfect metaphor to describe your home.

Below are 17 great examples to get your mind working.

List of Metaphors for Home

1. My Home is my Castle

People say their home is their castle to create the sense that their home is the place where they’re the king.

There is no one there in your house who can tell you what to do (unless you’re a kid – then your parents are the king and queen of the castle!).

There is a popular Australian movie called The Castle that uses this metaphor in the title. The movie is about a family trying to save their home (their castle) from developers who are trying to forcibly take it off them.

2. My Home is a Warzone

If you said your home was a warzone, you might think it wasn’t a particularly nice place to be.

You might use this metaphor if your brother and sister just argued all day long.

Or, it might be used to express how dirty the home is. There is a similar popular simile that means the same thing: “my home looks like a bomb hit it”. This usually means that there is a mess all over the floor.

3. My Home is a Swamp

When you say your home is a swamp, you usually mean that it’s messy, dark, and maybe even a little smelly.

This was both literal and metaphorical in the movie Shrek where the ogre Shrek lived in a swamp. The story behind this is that ogres are usually thought of as being dirty, smelly, and unkept. So, a swamp is a perfect place for them to live.

If you have a brother or sister who’s bedroom is usually dark and smelly, you perhaps might call their bedroom a swamp, too!

4. My Home is a Retreat

A retreat is usually thought of as somewhere that’s relaxing and calm. You might go to a spa retreat or meditation retreat to escape from the world and get some relaxation.

So, if you referred to your home as a retreat, you would be saying that your home is a peaceful place to escape from the world belong. It sounds like the perfect place to go after school or work and feel comfortable and relaxed.

5. My Home is a Classroom

If your home was a classroom, you might imagine that you learned a lot around the house.

You might say this if you felt like you learned a lot during your summer break from school.

Your mother or father might have taught you a lot of dishes to cook or given you a lot of games to play to help your brain.

Similarly, if you are homeschooled or do schooling over the internet, then your home might both metaphorically and literally be a classroom!

6. My Home is a Workplace

You might say that your home is a workplace or an office if you or your parents seem to always be working from home.

People who work from home might have a big computer setup with large monitors, webcams, and microphones. They might also have filing cabinets and stacks of work-related folders lying around.

Before long, the divide between work and home is blurred, and you can even metaphorically call your home a workplace because they appear so similar.

7. My Home is a Zoo

You can imagine a mother of 3 or 4 children calling her home a zoo. Just like a zoo, her home has a lot of little creatures (okay, humans) running around doing their own thing.

One child might be working on a project on the floor, another one jumping on the couch, and another crying in the bedroom.

The mother has to handle all of these things, and is feeling like she’s trying to coordinate a zebra, giraffe, and elephant, to all work in unison!

8. My Home is a Prison

Someone who doesn’t like being at home might call it a prison. For example, a child who loves to be out playing on the streets but needs to be indoors by 5pm might come home and say:

“It’s a prison in here! I want to be out playing with my friends.”

Another person who might call their home a prison could be someone who feels like they’re sick of being at home on vacation and wants to go back to school. They don’t like the feeling every day of having to entertain themselves at home!

9. My Home is a Dump

To call your home a dump is to say that it’s a complete mess! It’s so messy that you think if you close one eye and squint, you might have thought you were at the dump yard.

Your mother might say this if they come home and see that you’ve left all your toys lying out. Or, it is a metaphor that could be used if you have just cooked a big messy meal and turned around to see that there is flour and vegetable scraps and plates and bowls all over the counter.

10. This Home is a Cinema!

Have you ever walked into someone’s living room and it’s felt like you walked into a move theater?

Their curtains black out light, their chairs all face the television, there’s surround sound speakers, and of course there’s an enormous flat screen TV on the wall!

You could be mistaken for being in a movie theater. So, you can use this metaphor! Sometimes a little bit of exaggeration creates the best metaphors.

11. My Home is a Safety Blanket

To say your home is a safety blanket is to relate it to the characteristics of safety blankets: they make you feel comforted, safe, and protected from the world.

Often, home is the place where we feel safest. We’re most comfortable there, which is why we have the idiom: “I feel right at home”.

12. My Home is a Vault

You can imagine someone who has just installed a brand new security system might say: my home is a vault! No one can get in except for me.

Here, they’re using comparison (that a vault is hard to get into, just like the home), but instead of saying like a vault, they’re saying is a vault, for literary effect.

13. My Home is a Christmas Tree

At Christmas time, a lot of families go to all sorts of lengths to have their house lit up from the outside. People drive around the neighborhoods to see the beautiful houses lit up.

So, you could imagine someone who has just put lights all over their house standing back, looking at it, and remarking: “my home is now a Christmas tree!”

Another time you might use this is if you drive up your driveway to your home and see that all the lights are on inside. You might walk in and say, “Why is my home a Christmas tree? We don’t need all these lights on!”

14. My Home is a Playground

You could imagine if you lived in a house with a lot of children that you might feel like you were in a playground at times.

People are sliding down the stairs, someone has a toy train set out, and someone else is playing with dolls on the front step.

You might walk through all the different scenes of people playing and say, “wow, my home has become a playground today!”

Metaphors Comparing things to Home

15. My Office is my Home These Days

If you were to say that your office was your home, you would be saying that you’re always at the office!

This is the exact opposite of the earlier metaphor saying that your home is a workplace. Then, you were talking about how the home had turned into a place of work.

Now, we’re talking about the place of work starting to feel like you’re home because you’re there so much.

16. I’m at Home in the Forest

People who love the outdoors might feel most at ease and happy when they’re outside in the forest.

Because most people feel most at ease at home, then you can make this comparison to show you’re the opposite of them. “I’m at home in the forest” uses those associations we have of home (comfort, relaxation) and apply them to the outdoors.

Related: Tree Metaphors

17. My Wife is my Home

There is a famous song with the line “Home is wherever I’m with you”. Here, we’re creating a metaphor by saying a person is our home.

This is to say that one person (your mother, father, wife, husband) is the person who makes you feel most comfortable and relaxed. Again, we’re applying the feelings of being at home (relaxation and comfort) to some other situation and achieving this by making a comparative metaphor.

Related: Relationship Metaphors

Conclusion

There are plenty of possible metaphors for home. The best metaphors come from the heart. You need to think about what home feels like to you. Compare your house to somewhere else where you also feel those feelings that you can feel every time you step in your front door – whether it’s relaxation, comfort, escape, or even boredom!