Small household tasks offer us a metaphor for the sort of fixing we’re interested in but can’t yet quite manage inside ourselves. They give us the courage to imagine a day when we might be as tidy inside our minds as the linen cupboard outside currently is—thanks to what we did all afternoon.

But sensitivity to architecture also has its more problematic aspects. If one room can alter how we feel, if our happiness can hang on the colour of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to look at and inhabit? What will we experience in a house with prison-like windows, stained carpet tiles an

we see an example of how walls, chairs and floors can combine to create an atmosphere in which the best sides of us are offered the opportunity to flourish. We accept with gratitude the power that a single room can possess.