One advantage of the reduction of house prices now happening is that it makes us think more about connecting with our homes again – they become a place with which are going to have a long term relationship. The investment factor becomes less and we will be forced to consider enjoying it once again. A return to these traditional values is welcome. Several other advantages spring to mind including more time spent in the garden fixing it up and perhaps getting a veggie plot in as well. Good for health and stomachs. Another option is building a pergola or an area for Al Fresco eating. It’s a fantastic way to bring us into an outdoor room. Less ugly uncomfortable and ill used conservatories.

Secondly more cared for house - inside and out. I often think DIY has been high- jacked by the makeover mentality. Maintenance is one, big, important element of your relationship to your surroundings. Designers and home dwellers need to choose finishes and materials that can be maintained and age gracefully. Less PVC, more wood, natural paints and home made shelves, furniture, benches, blinds and linoleum.

Thirdly, the longer we stay in our homes the more we increase our connection to our neighbourhood. This makes for more inter-household support, less crime and better quality local activities.

Modern British housing hardly checks it customers into heavenly paradise. Genuine creativity in design of homes is limited, but there is a huge skill base in Britain’s design and house building community and with plenty of appetite for change that could meet some of our appetite for a home of our dreams. I ran a conference on this title last June.

The car purchaser buys into a sophisticated pre-researched product but the house buyer buys into high priced land, a thin veneer of design. The result is an experience short on well-being and the idea of home that people hold in the hearts. Most would agree that Britain’s house building industry needs re-inventing. Other countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Holland have exciting, well designed and reasonably priced modern housing. Why can’t we do it here?

What will we leave behind for our children? We could choose to live in sustainable, stylish, humane environments that are affordable, not built next to motorways. We have to work at it though creativity, research and better integration between the different constituencies of the housing industry.

I asked leading experts from the house building fraternity to talk to the conference about their vision and frustrations as well as their solutions - and to debate some of the major issues we face so that we can relearn the art of creating homes. Check out the websites of Ben Derbyshire at HTA architects, Wayne Hemingway at Hemingwaydesign for his project in Staiths near Newcastle and at Dartford. Bob Tomlinson at Living Villages.com. His company have been awarded the National Housebuilders Award for the best new home design. Also look at Urban Splash for their inventive and eye catching projects in Manchester.

For a thoughtful analysis of the housing industry look at the work of Yolande Barnes at Savill’s; for a humane analysis of what it is like growing up on a housing estate get a copy of Lynsey Hanley’s book Estates.

One year later we have a collapse in the financing for private house buying. What seems to me id s that those companies who build desirable environments will win out on the few sales opportunities as buyers get more power. But whether the big housebuilders – who spend an average of £150 on design per dwelling take any notice is another matter. The new sustainability focus might mean that they provide a few more trees and better bicycle paths but they still need to address the wider issues of poor internal design, lack of community focus, poor placing of housing either near noisy main roads or in hard to reach locations without public transport access and design style that has all the appeal of Harry Potters Dearsley’s ersatz tudor fusion estate.

I was talking with my wife over the w/e. She mentioned that she is making a discipline of not knowing the time – whenever possible and not wearing a watch, particularly at the weekends or on holiday. Looking at your watch disrupts flow – that feeling of total engagement with what you are doing as defined by psychologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Being able to engage with life and activity is when you feel happiest.

How can we as designers and householders make that happen more in our homes? Having spaces to withdraw is important, to be sociable too but also to make a mess. Home workshop rooms, spaces where mess is actively catered for - and I don’t mean just male sheds. A wild garden big enough to get lost in but also one that gets you out there, actively engaging in keeping it flourishing. Learning to allow it to be slightly out of control and enjoying nature having its way. Applying this to inside the home is possible too. It means spaces that kids can play in, boys can muck about making pretend camps on rainy days, fixing things with tools; the girls and the Mums should be able to do their stuff from with paint, clothes making Wendy houses or dolls house gear.

The philosopher Bergson (early 20th century) distinguishes between time and duration. Roger Scruton, the British Philosopher, talks about living well in the present. John Locke talks about time as a process. The fundamental entities in time are not substances but occasions – continuous process with the real, actual and remembering juggling away. During home time, particularly during leisure periods but also when one is in full action/function mode too, we can facilitate this by backing up these behaviours with spatial opportunities. Cooking spaces that overlap with sociability, withdrawal space that are really quiet (high value sound insulation), getting people involved with maintenance of their homes by providing a workshop. Building our houses out of materials that can allow us to enjoy maintenance would help. Goodbye to UPVC window frames & plastic floors, hello to wooden windows and floors, rendered, brick or timber walls that can painted would be a start.

What is important is to stop controlling ourselves with our house planning, our obsessions with rooms and activities. Less control means more creativity, more relaxation, more fun at home, more release of fantasy and of our imaginative life, Maybe it might result in better relationships too and ultimately more enjoyment of our environment.

What does being in a space mean? Kant looks at orientation as being over and above spatial relations. The notion of occupying space is far harder to understand than we think. We can describe things in terms of being (Hilbertian) geometry of points but things in space are more than that. Mathematical theory is only of limited help. Physical concepts such as solidity, rigidity and cohesion are necessary but so also is the complicated visceral world of perception, feeling, and concentration – general human senses related to being connected.

Time and space are mysteriously connected. In philosophical terms in terms of physical theory they are both dimensions according to Roger Scruton. They are structure by the between-ness relation – they have an orientation because time has an arrow, ie it can only move forwards although you can get swept through space you can’t hurry time. (See P366 A short History of Modern Philosophy).