Providing comfort in an ICU setting is often related to pain relief and end-of-life care; environmental factors are often neglected, despite the major role of the environment on the patients’ wellbeing and comfort. The aim of this paper is to explore the meanings of comfort from a theoretical and empirical perspective to increase the understanding of what comfort means in ICU settings. A lexical analysis and serials of workshops were performed, and data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis. The findings from the theoretical analysis show that comfort has a broad range of synonyms related both to subjective experiences and objective and physical qualities. The findings from the empirical part reveal four themes: comfort in relation to nature, comfort in relation to situation and people, comfort in relation to place and comfort in relation to objects and material. Materiality, functionality, memory, culture and history stipulate comfort. It is challenging to discern what comfort is when it comes to an individual’s function and emotions. We also found that comfort is closely linked to nature and wellbeing.