A Taste for Home is a cultural history of the middle-class home in late Ottoman Beirut that is at once global and local. Focusing on the period from the second half of the nineteenth century until World War I, the book shows how middle-class domesticity took form amid changing urbanity, politicizations of domesticity in public debates, and changing consumption patterns. Engaging with postcolonial theory, works on material culture, and consumption and gender studies, the book uses the notion of taste in both its aesthetic and political sense to critique the idea of “Westernization,” showing instead how “Europe” and the “West” are actively produced as places of difference. The privileged place the home occupied in discussions over the nature of the private and public spheres turned it into a model for members of the middle class in Beirut attempting to create a cultural niche and seeking greater influence in society. They strove to distinguish themselves not only from the class above, but also from a putative Western or European culture. The idealized home was forwarded as a model where modernity could be localized and an “Oriental” identity could be cultivated. The book argues that this model was in no way hegemonic, and that even as the home served to discursively localize difference, taste tied its most intimate spaces to modern forms of urbanity and to globalized modes of production.