6 July

Watch any home renovation show and in every case they do 2 things. 1. turn a home into a house i.e de-personalise it, making it more like a hotel. 2. ‘update’ the style to the latest trend, to ‘meet the market’. 1 and 2 are status games. True elegance is timeless, and much harder to achieve. Christopher Alexander tried to find a way to create it in architecture. This isn’t one of his buildings, but there are elements of real elegance here.