While I'm no architectural historian, I have taken a fair amount of interest in castles. In 1998 when we were touring Britain, we visited fifteen castles. My wife talked about ABC, "another bloody castle"!
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Many "castles" were just manor houses with defences which might or might not have any relevance to warfare. Often, they were built as homes first, with a bit of defensive walling added on as an afterthought. Often it was just affectation - the defences would have held up any determined attacker for all of five minutes at the most, and usually only that long because they would have hurt from laughing.
One of the most impressive castles, although it's not really as famous as Warwick Castle or the Edwardians in Wales, is Kenilworth in Warwickshire. It was built originally by one of Bill Clinton's ancestors (presumably complete with humidor) in the twelfth century. In the fifteenth it was the home of John of Gaunt (Henry IV's father and Henry V's grandfather). Robert Dudley had it in the sixteenth.
Kenilworth was a home (or more of a palace) as much as a defensive castle. The descriptions from the fifteenth century include mention of the hangings in the Great Hall. These were very expensive tapestries and were effective draught-catchers. They were also a form of conspicuous consumption and portable wealth. The windows were usually "glazed" in the bigger castles, although this could have merely been done with animal skins scraped thin (like vellum) in the meaner sort of castle.
They may not have been cosy retreats, but the castles which were also palaces were probably quite comfortable - at least for the owner and his family. This double use was quite common from the thirteenth century through to the early seventeenth. You should also remember that when war was not imminent, the owners of castles often either lived in smaller buildings within the bailey or close by. The Earl of Leicester actually built a manor house within the bailey of Kenilworth when he had the castle in the late 1500s. Great for bird-pulling, and the bird he was trying to pull was Elizabeth I. Didn't do him much good, did it? Henry V built a retreat outside the walls of Kenilworth and lived there for some time after Agincourt, but he was still within a very short distance of safety. Others may not have even lived in their castles at all except under wartime conditions. John of Gaunt lived in London quite a lot rather than at Kenilworth when he was in England, where he had an inn named, from memory, Cold Harbour. This was just a large house or inn-type building with no real defences at all.
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