Home. A baseline in the world. Perhaps the only place where we have anything like complete control of how that world is. And right now, what could be more important than that? When we are away from it, we describe places that strike a chord as “feeling like home”.

And yet, from much of what is being said at the present moment, home might as well be a prison. Spending time there is being portrayed as penitence, rather than pleasure. Many seem to be worried that spending time at home will send them up the wall. It should do the opposite. (I suspect that this is actually just the sound of the usual extroverts fearing what will happen if they are deprived of their social energy for a while).

It’s not like that for me. Much as though I love travelling, being out there in the buzz of modern life, there is nowhere I would ultimately rather be than home. It’s probably easier for an introvert – but never have I seen home as a prison.

I have spent a large proportion of the last four years at home – often alone. The mental health difficulties of 2016 and after meant that for quite a long time, I found it very difficult just to get beyond the front door. The loss of my career and related income meant that even after my difficulties abated, there was simply not the need to leave on a daily basis, nor the opportunity to do so, when it almost inevitably meant spending money that we didn’t have. So we fell back heavily on the things you can do at home.

Even now that I am working part-time again, in an environment where I can ‘spark’ off several thousand other people, I still look forward to coming home – to the place that is at once my restaurant, studio, café, spa, gallery, lounge, hotel, debating chamber, library, archive, concert hall, writing space, rehearsal room and workshop, all rolled into one. It is the defining backdrop of my, and our, life: the place where it has been possible to create a setting in which at least part of our lives can be lived on the stage of our choosing, rather than that of others.

A good home should wrap around you like a second skin, it should envelop you and fit like a glove. It is both a haven from others, and a place where you allow them a little further into your inner life. It is also a creative space in its own right – where we can be amateur architects, play with space, materials, texture and light, to create something that is both nurturing and restorative – and at what point might such a thing be more needed than now?

Perhaps I’m a little extreme (while I was unwell, I completed a diploma in interior design – it’s an interest that has always been there…). I’m aware that many others don’t seem to perceive, or feel about, their homes in this way. For quite a few, home seems to be solely a functional space, where they store worldly clobber and hang out when they can’t find anywhere better to go. Very often, this seems to be reflected in the attention (or lack of it) given to both aesthetics and organisation.

I’m tempted to wonder at the extent to which this is a wider cultural expression of a nation that perhaps lacks the creative spark of certain others, or which is inhibited from expressing itself by the near-universal British fear of social disapprobation. For rarely have I seen on the continent some of the utter shambles and aesthetic nightmares in which quite a few Britons seem to live. Pride in one’s home still seems socially acceptable there, without the accusation of social climbing.

A short while ago, the men who delivered a new appliance couldn’t resist showing me the pictures they had been required to take as evidence for their failure to install one in another house. I can’t begin to describe the appalling, insanitary horror displayed in those photos, apparently belonging to a “perfectly normal guy”, as they described him. What was happening there? Maybe deeply cerebral types simply don’t have enough spare head-space to pay attention to their surroundings – but I have always found the opposite: calming and comfortable surroundings are a great stimulus to creativity – simply because there are fewer jarring distractions.

I’m perhaps fortunate in that my “significant other” and I don’t have to deal with serious conflicts of taste or vision when it comes to what we want our home to be. It’s also been helpful that I am afflicted by neither macho hang-ups about being interested in home nor the less macho inability to realise and fix most things here myself. Our home is not prestigious: a two-bedroom apartment in an old school. It perhaps it is a little unconventional even for just being that; on occasions we have been gently ribbed for having produced a ‘show home’ – but it is not.

We happen to love a modern aesthetic that in this country (wrongly) seems associated with aspirational wealth. What we have done was entirely for our own private pleasure, no matter what others think – and it remains as calm when we are alone here as when we have visitors. Even a brief investigation of the origins of the modernist movement will show that it was founded in principles that were far-distant from the associations with affluence that it seems to have acquired.

It is true that we appreciate fine materials, design and workmanship. But it is a cultural error to correlate that with social one-upmanship. Such an appreciation does not always come with a high salary attached. It is certainly harder to achieve with more modest means – but it is possible precisely by paring back the aesthetic, reducing the amount of “stuff” one needs, and sinking one’s funds into a few signature pieces such as have lasted us for decades.

Doing much oneself can help, too: in what was a shell when we bought it, I laid the wooden floor, and fitted out two bathrooms and a kitchen myself. The doing of it is often less daunting than the fear of trying.

Our home is also a form of philosophical self-expression – in our case the belief that Mies was right, and Less really is More. It is also an expression of our Europeanism: much of what is, and happens, here is a product of our exposure to the domestic and wider interior tastes of many countries. Back in the Nineties I was already doing this, having been utterly bowled over by the styles on show in France, Switzerland and Italy, where simple modernism has never been seen as the eccentricity it was until fairly recently in Britain.

 

I still remember being stunned by the discovery of a boldly modern, kingfisher-blue Bulthaup kitchen installed in the Belle Epoque interior of the Chateau de Vidy in Lausanne, now part of the IOC headquarters and since refurbished again. I learned that there is more to homeliness than reproduction Victoriana or Georgian pastiche or ancient cottagey-ness.

For many years, I was my own personal importer of homewares from those countries, a situation that has now thankfully changed: another way in which this country has become unknowingly more European.

So for me, staying at home is no punishment. The modern home is equipped with everything needed to reach the world beyond, to allow it in on our own terms. It is the headquarters of our own lives. Our corporate selves might yearn for a beneficent call to visit HQ. But at home, the Chief Exec is us – and the HQ is ours, not theirs. What more could you want?

Might Now be a good time to pay renewed attention to your own headquarters?