Similarly in Hampstead, the so-called VXO house by Alison Brooks enhances its context by not being afraid of it. Brooks is an architect to watch - this shows, in architecture handled with real confidence, how something as initially unpromising as an extension to a 1960s house can become, in effect, a complete new house. Mind you, it had the new-house budget, at £587,000 for what is admittedly one of London’s most prime sites. The original aesthetic required some fairly radical tweaking - heroic red-painted angled steel columns supporting the new parts are not your conventional response - but this is what such design has historically always been about: adding layers, wings, new attitudes.

In Norfolk, the business that Jenny Hudson somewhat unexpectedly finds herself running is the classic rural one of holiday-let cottages. In this case, almost uniquely in this market, it is a chintz-free zone: high modern interiors that spin off from the local vernacular architecture but are not afraid to use new materials such as poured-resin gravel floors incorporating tiny round pebbles. Both she and her London-based architect husband Anthony Hudson find themselves slightly in two minds over this enterprise. Having painstakingly created, at a cost of £190,000, two highly imaginative houses out of what was a derelict corner of a farm courtyard, they now have to watch other people - usually total strangers - enjoy them. “Occasionally,” says Jenny, “I come and sit in one of them when it’s empty and think, gosh, this is nice. We organized all the work ourselves and it was done very quickly. Even we were surprised at the outcome. Sometimes we look at each other and wonder: where did those two houses come from?”