But equally, I think you can get obsessive about your space and sometimes that can lead to a controlled environment.

And it's important in a family house that there's a looseness and a comfort.

I think that tension for me is quite interesting and sometimes quite a challenge.

I'm Katie Woollacott, I'm an architect.

And we're in Hampstead in a house that my husband and I built.

We lived in the original house on the site and it was a good experience for the family.

It was very sweet.

It was very intense, but it was also very tight.

And as the children got bigger, it got increasingly difficult to live in.

Designing this house was like solving a Rubik's cube.

First of all there's the shape of the site, which is really unusual.

The fact that it's in a conservation area, there's a general distaste for anything modern.

So it was how to make a house that was modern but on second glance.

We had to design this form within these constraints.

There are all these things that as an architect we're taught.

We need more light and we need to take down the walls.

But I think as time has gone on, we've begun to realise that if you take down all the walls, there's no place to hang the pictures.

And if you put in too many windows, I mean, I describe it as like an overexposed photograph.

Tuning the light, so that there's not too much and there's not too little.

Also light balance within the room is so critical.

It's not just getting the light, but what does it fall on?

What I think is great about contemporary houses is that you can design them in a way that suits, how we live today.

Houses today are at a different temperature than they were in Victorian times.

And the relationship between the kitchen and the living spaces is different because it's not servant and served.

It's just such a luxury, such a privilege to be able to design a house and inhabit it, and see how it affects your way of life.