Worldwide, there is an urgent imperative to provide a housing supply that is environmentally sustainable as well as acceptable and desirable for its users. A holistic and integrative understanding of the relationship between households’ residential preferences and dwellings is needed to achieve this goal. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualizing and operationalizing housing as a system whose human and material behaviours are determined by its function. Following a qualitative literature review to identify what housing functions are and investigate their effects on the housing system, we explore the applicability of such functions in Swiss tenants’ residential mobility. Results show that multiple functions co-exist in the housing realm, each of which determines various human (i.e. residential preferences) and material (i.e. dwelling forms) behaviours that vary according to given societal and environmental structural elements (e.g. geography, culture). We also observe that housing functions potentially provide the missing link between the determinants of tenants’ residential mobility.