Our culture’s obsession with property – as self-expression, as glamorous or quirky backdrop, as literally solid investment, as anything beyond mere shelter and warmth ‒ has long called for some poetic attention. This book steeps us in the language of estate agents (‘a queen’s bath/ all fixtures and fittings/ Grade A’), of homes-and-gardens magazines (‘her unmistakeably good taste in period furniture’), and of TV property programmes (‘this house you’ve lovingly/ restored’). It indulges the lush clichés of those genres: the ‘generous’ terrace, the ‘expansive’ view, the ‘sprawling’ garden, the ‘sapphire’ pool. Things are ‘nestled’, ‘richly patterned’, ‘timeless’ and ‘chocolate box’. An archway ‘embraces’, a sofa ‘relaxes’, cliffside houses ‘cling’, and one place even ‘offers its liminality’.
Each poem here is a different building, most often experienced from inside and, notwithstanding the book’s title, attending as much to interior design as to architecture. And each poem, the paratext tells us, is a dream. Many of the buildings, then, are dream houses in every sense. Floors are marble, beeswaxed, ‘sun-faded cobalt’ or ‘tiled in tarnished gold’. Ceilings are coffered, vaulted, ‘triple height’ or ‘unreachably high’. Walls are amber, sienna, candy blue, yellow and pink. We’re regaled with endless balconies, sofas, gardens, pools and views. Size and space are the qualities most insistently featured:
Capacious central foyer,
multi-level entrances
into tremendous apartments.
Cathedral ceilings, crystal wall
views to the ocean.
Turkish rugs.
Sculpture.
A sense of space […]
The temples of consumption and culture also cross the threshold of this sleeper’s subconscious: hotel, restaurant, mall, opera house, concert hall. But it’s not all glitz: so do a hippy bender and a hovel, the latter as nightmare.
The dream conceit spares us from narratives that make conventional sense. Also from direct politics ‒ excepting a Palestinian-run café with a poster saying, ‘burn our houses but we’ll keep dancing’ at the degree zero of housing crisis. Dreams of buildings, rather, point to psychology, and especially (I assume) to Jung, for whom the house was the archetype of the psyche. Jung’s ideas might be without empirical foundation, but they’ve got longstanding artistic utility, and a common move within the poems is to turn from the outward descriptions towards an ‘I’ or ‘we’ discovered within them.
This is where it gets really interesting. The dreamer’s response to all the architectural splendours isn’t confined to the awed and admiring adjectives. She’s persistently afflicted with anxiety and unease. ‘I pretend I belong’; ‘I will not go further in’; ‘I am panicking’; ‘I need to leave’. She views the buildings’ owners sceptically or distrustfully. She is excluded or, one time, chased out. To finish the poem quoted above:
Intercom,
guards, multiple
pools outside
to which residents only
are granted access.
Where, as often, the architecture of impressiveness is also an architecture of hierarchies and exclusions.
The unease is linked to the desire for these inaccessible splendours, starting with the proem’s plaintive ‘How can we reach them?’ not long followed by, ‘how could we afford this/ ever’. Of course, the house is famously the commodity that you can spend your life buying. ‘Why are we here?’ our dreamer asks teleologically. ‘House shopping…’ But even in ownership, anxiety remains unallayed. In one dream, ‘we’ ‘invested in property’ ironically enough in a ‘conservation area’:
But our home is gone.
All that remains is a dusty
square surrounded by other
people’s properties.
And the book’s final image is:
A house
that from a distance
looks like a house
but when approached
becomes a sheet of plywood
raised up on stilts
in the shape of a house.
In their materiality, buildings are about basic needs; in reverie, this book proposes, they’re sites of conflicting emotions that we can find hard to acknowledge, never mind resolve. In its elliptical, quiet way, it’s onto something resonant and rather subversive.
Guy Russell 2nd May 2026
