The Apartment

You want the city outside the door and a small number of very good rooms behind it. An apartment rewards precision more than any other kind of home, because there is no spare space to absorb a bad decision.

What works about it

You get the restaurants, the galleries and the walk home, and you get a home that can be maintained by one person in an hour. Apartments also let you spend the entire budget on the two or three things you touch every day, which is a genuinely better allocation than most houses achieve.

What to watch

Storage and sound. Every apartment is short of the first and vulnerable to the second, and both are far cheaper to solve during a renovation than after. Also resist scaling furniture down: one large sofa and one large piece of art make a small room feel considerably bigger than four small things do.

The rooms it needs

• One generous room instead of two adequate ones
• A kitchen with a pantry cupboard, however small
• A hall that is more than a corridor, because it is the whole arrival
• Somewhere to put a coat, which is the failure of nine apartments in ten