I’ve never met the architect Richard Rogers, but this past Yom Kippur, I stopped to pee at his house in London, and, like the Beatles post-Maharishi, I was permanently altered. Why did I stop to use Richard Rogers’s powder room? Because I had to, and it was closer than the nearest Starbucks, and my strolling partner, Josh, who had similar needs, suggested the idea.

“They’re home, right?” I said, referring to Rogers and his wife, Ruthie, a chef.

“No,” said Josh. “But it’s totally fine. They won’t mind.”

“What?”

I did not think it was appropriate to take a leak in a man’s home while he was off having a retrospective in China. On Yom Kippur. But Josh and I had been walking for hours and fasting for longer, and he insisted that it would be kosher. The Rogers had taken him in for two years in the wake of his divorce, so he knew that the couple had an open-door policy that came equipped with a code, which he punched into the door’s keypad.

Huh, I thought. Richard Rogers never has to fumble through his pockets for keys, the first inkling of the ingenuity inside of which I, the Maharishi of Fumbling For Keys, took note as we broke and entered into his house.

My crime might have been more thrilling had it been executed by someone better versed in the history of architecture—the equivalent of a Beatles’ fan breaking into Lennon’s childhood bedroom to play his first banjo—but I am, regrettably, no expert in architecture. If there were baseball cards for architects, I’d know enough to collect Gaudi, Gehry, and Wright, but it’s not like I’m up on the latest M.V.P.s. It took me years to remember that Rem Koolhaas is an architect, not a fashion designer, and only then after I realized his last name is its own mnemonic. (Don’t try this at home with Renzo Piano.)

Like most humans, however, I do have undeniable affinities and nostalgia for certain places and buildings, and the Pompidou Center, in Paris, designed by Rogers, is near the top of the list. The Pompidou, with its inside-out design—heating ducts, plumbing, electrical wires, and escalators are all exposed on the outside, leaving the inside cavernous and bright—is one of those buildings Parisians love to hate, but I’ve always been smitten by it. Back in the eighties, when I was living in Paris, it became my beacon: when I was feeling lonely and detached or in need of light, whimsy, and space—being the twenty-something American occupant of an eighty-one-square-foot Parisian chambre de bonne will do that to you—I would be instinctually drawn to the Pompidou, like an ant to an anthill. Whether inside the museum or outside on its gently sloped plaza, which reminded me of the outdoor seating of an ancient Greek theatre, I would feel at one with the human fabric, a fluid member of both audience and stage.

But did I know the name of the architect who designed it? No, I did not. Did I stop to think about the effects of architecture on my psyche? No again. I simply knew that I liked to go there.

Back in London, Josh led me through the entryway vestibule at the back of Rogers’s house, which is actually two houses that the architect gutted and joined together, turning two typical Chelsea dwellings into a giant, light-flooded loft. The guest bathroom, located in a rare windowless area between the front door and the loft, is a miniscule space whose electric-pink walls are no wider than the toilet itself, no deeper than my arms stretched wide. It houses exactly two elements: the toilet and a sink the size and shape of a half melon, which operates with a knee-height pedal since it’s too small for knobs. As I stood in that micro-room, using my knee to wash up with a bar of soap hung on a short rope, I marvelled at how perfectly and purposefully that en dash of space had been utilized and designed.

What a contrast, I thought, to my home office back in New York, which is also small, long, and narrow, but designed as if by an imbecile. Or as if by someone who made a desperation move at the start of the recession and was resigned to its seemingly chronic imperfections.

Like the pink bathroom, my office, where I spend sixty hours a week, must serve two functions, a place to work and a place for guests to sleep. But at the time, neither of the pieces of furniture worked spatially or practically. The desk was an ill-considered monstrosity purchased a decade earlier to fulfill an inflated fantasy of what a writer’s desk should look like. Too large for the space it inhabited, too high for a laptop, its grooved surface was equally inhospitable to writing longhand, and its metal support beams struck me in the thighs whenever I pushed in my chair, leaving permanent bruises. The couch—a cheap loveseat from IKEA—was too short for guests to sleep on without folding it out, but the room was too narrow to unfold it. These two objects, Grendel’s desk and the Catch-22 couch, became a daily reminder of everything occupying space in my life without serving its alleged purpose: the toaster in the kitchen that barely toasts; socks whose partners ran off years ago yet still insist on waiting, patient Penelopes, for their sock Ulysses. Plus I had to turn sideways to squeeze by one to sit down at the other.

Studying the simplicity of Rogers’s pink powder room—how it was designed to whimsically emphasize its limitations rather than trying to mask them—I began to reconsider the seemingly intractable constraints of my small office. Instead of throwing up my hands in the face of its deficiencies, I thought, Why not try to figure out a way to make peace with them by celebrating them? For three years, since we’d moved, I’d meant to reorganize that space into something functional, but one book led to another, one assignment to another, and I’d told myself that I didn’t have the time, money, or energy to make it happen.

Three years is a long time to spend eight hours a day in a non-functional space, but there were other areas in the lean-to of my life that had felt equally dysfunctional for longer than that. There were relational issues, health issues, existentialism, grief. I’d flown over to Europe to accompany another friend to her various breast-cancer treatments following my own hospitalization for a hysterectomy—together, we joked, our illnesses lopped off an entire reproductive system—but I was also looking for the kind of answers that stepping outside one’s own life and problems can sometimes provide.

I exited the bathroom and entered the Rogers’s three-story-high living space, a vast paean to the gods of decluttering. Josh was slumped comfortably on the single couch (a large couch, but still, that room could have easily held seven), in no rush to leave. “Wait, why’d you take off your coat?” I said, growing more uncomfortable with our intrusion by the minute. Now that I no longer had a flimsy excuse to be in that house, it felt wrong to stay. But Josh had just texted his girlfriend, who was planning on meeting us there, and then it started to rain. “Trust me,” he said, “it’s totally fine. We’ll stay here until the rain stops, O.K.?”