I am always a soft touch for reading American settler stories and viewing well-crafted, self-built houses. Nancy Hiller links together an age-old desire – to build a home of your own – with a democratic idea that anyone should be able to do it. In a civilised world, it should a universal right. And in America it’s almost true, or at least it was. Plentiful land has provided the opportunity to willing souls, beyond the obvious candidates of males and well-monied types, to single women, hippies, poorer families and poets.

Nancy’s delightful, brave and original book, A Home of Her Own, shows what comes about when women build their own homes. It breaks from the classic interior design format, so it has the missing bits included – mini-biographies of the individuals who have built against the odds, as well as indoor and outside photos. You get the whole picture, not just smart, primed-up, perfectly decorated interiors.

A very personal account of Nancy’s emotional relationship with the first American house she bought herself (she lived in Reading, UK when she was younger) and her longing for it, provides a moving account and an insight into the wider aspects of what the process gave her. As she is both a cabinet-maker and an academic, renovating the house gave her mental relief during a difficult time.  It backs up the claims of Sherry Tuckle, sociologist and author of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, that objects naturally become emotional companions that anchor memory, inspire meditation, demand time and commitment, and foster total connectedness to place by encouraging the development of skills.

When you make stuff yourself, build your own roof and walls yourself, the emotional quotient doubles. I recently re-built a workshop in the woods with my son Felix, and my brother (sadly, not my daughter). It’s small, basic and of simple construction but every time I go into it I feel a ridiculous amount of pleasure.

In my opinion, a country where you can build a home of your own is a place where democracy thrives and the living must be good. If women can do it on their own, why don’t we have more women builders, craftsman, particularly cabinet makers?

Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker’s roving food writer, has just written the most lively and enjoyable food book of the year, The Table Comes First. His elegant and original, punchy observations follow the subtitle: Family, France, and the meaning of food. Except it doesn’t quite. Fergus Henderson, the British restaurateur and campaigner for eating the whole animal, provides the title. ‘ I don’t understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television, don’t they know the table comes first?’ Perfectly put.

Kitchen making begins by placing the table in front of a window with the best view. Sanity begins when you sit down to eat. The world with all its distractions and bad news is suddenly at bay, sidelined, on hold. A sense of relief gives way to the prospect of sociability, warm words (you can hope for with reason although it does not always work out) and tasteful pleasures. The table represents the aura of family and customs of civilization, whatever the culture or ethnic tribe you belong to Even if it’s a small table – and in some ways this is more intimate, no kitchen should be without one. It might even be worth thinking about two smaller tables – one is often in use as a non-food shuffle of books, papers, laptops and objects of daily life, like a clearing station for in transit. Having two tables saves clearing up every time you want to eat. For our own home I would rather sacrifice countertop space and make sure we were properly tabled-up. I try to persuade clients of this, though not usually successfully!

Raising the status and respect for the table and what it represents to the household and the value of eating together, whether once a day or regularly during the week, gets my vote.

Steve Jobs and his wife Laurene almost had one of my kitchens. We’re going back 18 years to the autumn of 1994 when they contacted me through a mutual friend. I am sad to say they did not in the end go through with the kitchen, but I worked productively with the two of them as far as the production drawing stage.

Remarkably, for one of the world’s richest individuals, Jobs lived in modest style. He and Laurene were in their mid-to-late thirties when we met but did not seem interested in setting themselves up with bourgeois comfort and display. Instead, despite having two children, they lived a bit like self-disciplined students: the first things you saw inside the front door were a plumbed-in washing machine and a dryer (temporarily located there during building modifications). This was in Palo Alto in what they called their cottage, which they preferred to the big house down the coast in Woodside. They liked to think of the cottage as English. It was vaguely Arts and Crafts in style, a relaxed-looking interior somewhat under-furnished with Persian rugs and freestanding pieces. Unmissable was their love of music with piles of CDs, records and guitars about the place, the only objects that might amount to clutter. Unlike a real English cottage the house was light and spacious.

I went on to design a kitchen, utility rooms and some furniture. The kitchen brief was to keep a modern Arts and Crafts look in mind, with plenty of space for prepping and a circular central island. A walk-in cool chamber was an innovative feature.  The Jobses were staunch vegetarians, Laurene having set up a vegan food business. The kitchen was where they lived, albeit inherited from a previous owner, and consisted of boring white units with tiled tops and wooden edges. Nevertheless, it was the setting for the kind hospitality they showed to me, most of it on a cramped table in the corner sitting on chairs with wobbly legs.

As members of the Whole Earth Catalogue generation, vegetable gardening and self-sufficiency were important to the Jobses. We talked about redesigning the garden to provide more privacy for the house. Steve’s love of gardens was not generally known. We discussed creating outdoor rooms with borders, wild flowers clustered together to ensure plenty of colour, with privacy from the street. I spent time helping him find an English gardener.

During the following three years I saw Steve and Laurene at their home when I visited to polish up the design. We once met in London at the Savoy hotel during one of his rushed, but highly publicised European trips. His comments, as you might expect knowing his track record at Apple, were brief and to the point, mostly in the direction of simplifying the design, staking out a more severe, monastic approach. Shaker simplicity was often his default position. I suspect he became more of a modernist in the late nineties.

He was a very private person and reluctant to have any building work done, powerfully disliking noise, mess and invasion of their home. Steve recommended that I open a showroom in San Francisco, and I duly did in 1999. He said Americans needed to employ more serious design skills in their kitchens. The Jobses still live in the same house today. I noticed fans were scrawling messages on the pavement in front in a news clip today

He re-enforced a myth I grew up with, that America was the future, and that its technology was going to lead the world to a better place. We will be poorer off without him.

RIP