The 4th house is anchored by the IC, the chart's lowest point, and describes home in the deepest sense: family, ancestry, and the private foundation nobody else sees, the parts of a life that were never meant to be public.
It's an angular house, carrying real weight in the wheel, and sits opposite the 10th house, the most public point in the chart, the contrast between who you are at home and who you become in front of everyone else.
The 4th house traditionally governs the home, one parent (conventions differ on which), ancestry, and property, the private, domestic end of a life that isn't conducted in front of other people. Anchored by the IC, the chart's lowest point, it's also traditionally read as the end of a matter, the foundation a life eventually returns to rather than the direction it visibly travels in.
Because it sits at the chart's lowest, least visible point, the 4th house tends to describe patterns formed before a person had much say in them, family habits, an early sense of whether the world felt basically safe, absorbed so early they can be mistaken for simply how life works rather than one pattern among many. Opposite the 10th house, the most public position in the chart, the 4th house marks everything that stays unwitnessed by design, the private counterweight to whatever a life eventually becomes known for.