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This paper investigates how users (residents, caregivers and visitors) of assisted living facilities invest spaces to make them more homely. A dual perspective on social and architectural environment is adopted to analyze person-environment relationships. Semantic accuracies of the French meaning of “homeliness” are sought to identify modalities that enable institutions to be domesticated, in the sense of enabling their daily use by users. Concepts such as care, choice, use, space, and atmosphere are examined to understand how to make living facilities homely, in order to fit their users’ views of feeling at home.