When the time came to rebuild the Chamber of the House of Commons which had been destroyed in an air raid, Winston Churchill vigorously opposed a design that was bright, airy and spacious, writes Breda O'Brien.
He did not want every member of the House to have "a desk to sit at and a lid to bang". He thought it was good that it would be crowded, and not everyone would have a place to sit. He believed it would contribute to a sense of urgency that would be valuable to lawmakers.
He then, memorably, observed: "First we shape our houses, and then they shape us."
In Ireland we have tended to think: first we shape our housing policy, and then it shapes us, placing most of the blame for sky-rocketing prices and the social consequences of them on factors outside our control.
Yet some of it is within our control. Everywhere you go in the countryside, there are enormous houses being built.
The picture is slightly different in the city, where people buy smaller houses out of necessity, but among the well-off middle classes trading up has become an obsession. The odd thing is that people are having fewer children, and these houses are frequently empty all day.
It is impossible to sustain mortgage repayments without two incomes. Our houses dominate our existence in all sorts of ways. Since both parents are usually out at work, different kinds of caring work have to be sub-contracted. The most obvious example is the care of children.
Yet there has also been a divorce from domesticity. Houses need cleaning, but people are too exhausted to clean, so the next logical step is a cleaner or housekeeper. Did we ever think we would see a return to the servant class, and that most of it would be provided by people from poorer countries?
We have had some egregious examples, where women have been treated like slaves, forced to work long hours and paid less than the minimum wage.
Even where domestic workers are treated well, the sub-contracting of the work changes in some subtle way the relationship with the home. The work is done by others, because it is the least important and most expendable.
It automatically has less status than the work that takes us away from domesticity. Strange, is it not, that the liberation of women is dependent on the labour of other, less well-paid, women?
Meanwhile, men's lives have changed very little, if at all.
Yet if we are less frequently in our homes because of the demands of paid work, that workload also follows us home. The insistent shrill of mobiles disrupts evening meals. E-mail means constant availability, while some parents are more intimate with their laptop than they are with either their spouse or children. It has become harder and harder to draw the boundaries between work and home.
There is nothing new about work and home being entwined. Farmers have known about it for centuries, and before the age of industrialisation people's homes were also their workplaces. However, we foolishly thought that technology would give us more time, instead of gobbling every second we have.
Technology has also had an impact on the way we relate to each other. One child may be in the living-room watching television, while another is playing computer games in a bedroom. Larger spaces mean more chance to be isolated.
Everyone needs personal space, but frequently it is not space for reflection, but for aimless or frenetic activity. Family meals become rarer, as people drift in and out and sling something in the microwave when they are hungry.
It is not just the age of technology, but the age of acquisition. As Will Rogers opined, too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like. It could almost be a definition of the kind of frantic spending which goes on at Christmas.
Personally, I know my children have too much stuff, and that it is hard for them to bond with any toy when they have so many to choose from. But I still find it impossible to call a halt to filling the house with more things.
The days when children had one beloved teddy, or a doll with one eye that got dragged everywhere, seem to be long gone. In fact, the amount of time in childhood which children spend actually playing with toys, as opposed to electronic games, seems to decrease every year.
Some households try to have some space preserved from technology, and I think that is very wise. One friend of mine attributes the fact that her now-adult children turned out to be sensible, dependable people to the fact that between six and seven was family time, around the kitchen table. No telephone calls, no television, just the much neglected art of chatting.
Homes should be a place of refuge. One of the reasons some people find Christmas so stressful is that we all have an idealised image of home; fed, among other things, by countless childhood television matinees showing us perfect families.
When, instead, our homes are places of strained relationships and stress, the contrast between the ideal and reality is very difficult to bear. However, there is such a thing as the "good enough home", where there is enough peace and support to help us cope with all that life throws at us.
One of the healthiest aspects of Irish life is the way we effectively wind down the country for two weeks at Christmas time. The sad thing is that some people will be stir-crazy after a few days, so unaccustomed are they to spending so much time at home with their families.
However, if we could live through the discomfort, we might find that Winston had a point. Homes were meant to help us live better lives, to recharge for the stresses of everyday life.
They were never meant to dominate our lives and determine our priorities. High mortgages are a fact of life, but it might be a useful exercise this Christmas to reflect on whether our houses help us to live well, or whether we are working endless hours for homes that we have no time to enjoy.
bobrien@irish-times.ie