The idea of comfort "has meant different things at different times. In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which lead to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity. The eighteenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts--light, heat, and ventilation. The twentieth century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience."
Today, then, "domestic comfort involves [this] range of attibutes--convenience, efficiency, leisure, ease, pleasure, domesticity, intimacy, and privacy--all of which contribute to the experience"