Households are central to Henri Lefebvre’s 1940s-1980s critiques of everyday life. They are the first spaces of everyday modernity that he analyses and include an extended sociology of women’s contradictory roles in consumption and nurture. Households perpetuate archaic, patriarchal forms but are incompletely colonized by media and consumerism. On this basis, Lefebvre champions peasant households as repositories of alternative potential which could form the basis for a different socioeconomic order than capitalism. Feminist analysis of ‘the global intimate’ has seized on this promise but develops beyond Lefebvre’s heterosexist and romanticized view of post-World War II women as ambiguous, oppressed and deluded (colonized). This paper mines Lefebvre’s key texts for his treatment of heterosexual cis-women and men, violence, intimacy, patriarchy, feminism and gender. These dimensions of the household give a more precise understanding of Lefebvre’s romanticization of the patriarchal peasant household and community. Alongside his critics and lovers such as Francoise d'Eaubonne, I argue that he is a transitional figure from the Marxist tradition who prefigures feminist analyses of the global intimate. However, households hold promise as a ‘margin-within': an enclaved, nested, alternate spatialisation and counterspace within the dominant order of social space. The everyday household emerges as a crucible and social form of differences and contradictions that could be extended into a ‘differential space’ that supports maximal diversity and opportunity with minimal organisation or regression to more oppressive intergenerational, kin and gender relations. Is the household and the global intimate a basis for spatial justice or does its combination of recalcitrance, moral and consumer colonization, and enclaved qualities render it too challenging for progressive action?