Over the course of the twentieth-century, the primary path toward the ‘good life’ in the United States involved the purchase of a single family home in the suburbs, which promised financial security, social independence and access to a healthy environmental and verdant greens-pace. But the system that developed was also built on racial exclusion and unsustainable and environmentally destructive levels of resource consumption. An examination of the spaces of the single-family home shows the challenges in creating a just and sustainable good life, as the social meaning and material realities of the system become intimately tied together.