Aesthetes will have no choice but to forgo the company of small children

The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.

Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice.

But in architecture, as in dress, conversation and choice of career, Walpole prided himself on being different. In spite of his Classical education, his real interest lay in the medieval period, which thrilled him with its iconography of ruined abbeys, moonlit nights, graveyards and (especially) crusaders in armour. Walpole therefore decided to bui

surfaces. They have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street.

Houses can invite us to join them in a mood which we find ourselves incapable of summoning.

Limitations bred strong local architectural identities.

Among the most versatile of the new polymaths was an Englishman named Humphry Repton, who earned a reputation for presenting hesitant clients with detailed drawings of the many stylistic options available to them.

‘Home life today is being paralysed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture,’ her architect protested. ‘This notion should be rooted out and replaced by that of equipment.’