A woman once told me about a visit she made with her husband to an oncologist, to receive the results of his biopsy. She was perhaps in her late 60s, a grandmother, married for 40-odd years. They were kept waiting for a long time, a tense interlude in which she occupied herself with the question of how she would redesign the waiting room if it had to become their permanent home. She had created domestic spaces for so many years, she said, that such thoughts had become a sort of mental tic, a reflexive action she performed to soothe herself. By the time she had resolved the various problems of insufficient light, wrongly positioned doorways and an institutional style of décor, the wait was over and they were called in for their appointment — where, thankfully, she said, the news was better than expected.

As is often the case when people are honest, these remarks struck me as deeply familiar while at the same time creating in me a strong desire to disown them. Not long before, I was driven to what appeared to be the brink of mental and physical collapse by embarking on the complete remodeling of our London flat, and while it was true that my children and I were now enjoying the benefits of living in a more pleasant environment, I still felt a certain sense of shame at how determinedly I brought these events about. I caused walls to be knocked down and floors to be ripped up and rooms to be gutted; I threw away decades’ worth of clutter and keepsakes and old furniture; with what at times seemed like magic and at others sheer violence, I caused the past to be obliterated and put something new, something of my choosing, in its place. At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed: The numberless private decisions I had made, from the colors on the walls to the bathroom taps, were exhibited for all to see. What’s more, the very people — my family and friends — for whom this vision was realized threatened by their presence to defile it. I flinched when they sat on the new sofa, and I darted nervous glances at their shoes strolling imperviously over the unmarked floor; every scratch and scrape and stain felt as if it were being inflicted directly to my own flesh. I carped at my two adolescent daughters for leaving their possessions strewn over the furniture and berated them for the evidence they left of themselves in the kitchen. At the time I felt myself to be serving the reality of my domestic life with them — enhancing it, dignifying it — but now it almost seemed as if what I really wanted all along was to erase it.

The “old” flat had been thickly carpeted in a spongy brown wool that caused me not the merest flicker of identification as it underwent the pummelings of daily life; in the cramped kitchen, whose orange-tiled walls and floor gave it something of the dim atmosphere of a butcher’s shop, people had happily sat wedged around the table in the murky light on an assortment of chairs and stools of different heights. We had inhabited the old warren of rooms almost with the carefreeness of children, for in a sense those rooms were not ours, not the product of our will or design; yet that same feeling of lawlessness seemed also to create the possibility of getting lost. We were forever searching for one another, calling, wandering from room to room. Sometimes it was hard even to know whether anyone was at home: The thick carpet doggedly absorbed the sounds of life.

We were both more and less ourselves in that undistinguished space, less burdened but less anchored too; freer and yet unreflected, for nothing there gave us back an image of ourselves. When people visited, I felt the need to offer explanations: I would describe what was going to be done to it and what it would look like, as though creating a home out of mere words, and watch their faces brighten as the vision transferred itself from my head to theirs. One day an acquaintance came round, and before I could embark on my tale, he remarked, running his hand fondly over the peeling laminate kitchen counter, on how rare and refreshing it was to be somewhere untransfigured, somewhere of an authentic ugliness that didn’t look like a photograph in a magazine or a poor imitation of one. He complimented me on taking this stand against the ubiquity of middle-class tastes; he appeared to view it as an artistic and philosophical position. Don’t ever change it, he said with a small smile. I’ll be disappointed if you do.