“Thanks for the last 30 years. See you at Home,” says a sign on the empty, boarded up Cornerhouse in Manchester. Home is several hundred metres up the road, an unassuming new glass-fronted building where Cornerhouse has merged with the old Library theatre to create a £25 million arts complex that includes two theatres, five cinemas and a visual arts gallery. Not far at all, but the psychological distance between old and new can be significant.

When Hampstead theatre was rebuilt just metres from its original location, for a long time it felt as if it had left part of its heart and soul had been left behind. On the other hand, the closure of the old Cottesloe (now re-opened as the Dorfman) and the opening of the Shed (now called the Temporary Space) may have seemed like a loss to some regular National Theatre audiences, but also created a whole new audience through a more relaxed vibe and programming that reflects contemporary theatre trends. That corner of the building has become colonised in a way that feels very different from the other NT foyer spaces.

The question for Home, of course, is how soon it will genuinely start to feel like home to those who visit and make work there. Because while you can name an arts centre Home, a building is not a home: it is the audiences who go there and the artists who work there who make it feel lived in, accessible and welcoming.

Home has been doing all the right things. On its opening weekend, an artistic house-warming included the premiere of Simon Stephens’s The Funfair and plenty of free and low-cost events. By Friday morning the cafe was being occupied by young mothers and their children, and people taking advantage of free Wi-Fi in an area of the city that has lacked public spaces. It felt immensely welcoming. But the truth is that too many of our publicly funded theatres still feel way under-used when performances are not taking place, and never really succeed in making their venues feel like home: the kind of place that you might settle down in as you would your own living room.

Those who do manage to do that often thrive. The recent outpouring of grief and support following the fire at Battersea Arts Centre was a reflection not just of how much the Lavender Hill venue is cherished among theatre makers and theatre goers, but also of its crucial place in the local community. BAC’s foyer and bar areas are public spaces that feel genuinely as if local people have ownership of them. I heard recently about a group of people who simply pitched up one evening for a birthday celebration in the foyer complete with cake. Was permission needed? No. Were they welcome? Of course, because it’s a public space and they were no problem for anyone else using the building. Try and do that in some theatres and you’d be evicted pretty sharpish.

An audience at Battersea Arts Centre, London. Photograph: Alex Brenner

That theatre buildings belong to their communities is still not as well understood as it should be by some venues. They appear to simply want audiences to buy a ticket for their shows, turn up in time to spend some money in the cafe or bar and leave as soon as possible afterwards. But you can’t make long-term relationships that way; you can’t have proper conversations with people and an equal relationship if you don’t fling open your doors and let them know that the building is theirs to use as they desire.

While I was in Manchester last week I also went to the Royal Exchange’s A Night at the Theatre, which is part of a longer-term and imaginative audience-engagement initiative examining the invisible contract between a theatre building and its audience, kickstarting conversations around what a theatre is and might be. A Night at the Theatre was exactly what the title suggests: a dusk-to-dawn sleepover in the theatre, complete with Maxine Peake reading a bedtime story written by Chris Thorpe, a puppetry workshop, conversation, a specially composed lullaby sung by a massed choir, and backstage ghost tours delivered by The Ghost Train cast. It was a terrific evening, driven by the proposition that if it really is your theatre, why shouldn’t you sleep there? After all, that’s what you do at home.