The glass elevator led out into a cross passage where we did the dance of the noddy suit whereby the grave dignity of the law is mitigated by the need to hop on one foot while you try and get the stupid paper leg over the other. Guleed, it turned out, was wearing leggings under her skirt – which she left, along with her scarf, in the clear plastic bag provided. Once we were safely zipped up in our hygienic forensically-neutral paper suits Guleed led me to the left, where a pair of mahogany doors had been propped open with a portable light stand. Beyond was a short hallway with a curved far wall and a lot of abstract art on the walls.

In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums. An elegantly proportioned room can have whitewashed walls and a bare wooden floor. But if it’s an awkward shape, then all the piano-finish rosewood occasional tables riches can provide aren’t going to do anything more than annoy the cleaners. One Hyde Park, I saw, had all the basic architectural charm of a brutalist council flat – except on a larger scale. The rooms were much wider, of course. But pressure to maximise the number of flats meant that the ceilings were disproportionately low.

We found Seawoll just around the corner in what the plans listed as a ‘study’. The architects had laid out each wing to maximise the light, with a long central corridor and side rooms branching off like the veins in a leaf. This meant they all had walls on the diagonal, severely restricting the decorator’s choice about where furniture could be placed. If you didn’t want to block the doors, the access or blot out the windows then the beds, cupboards, shelves and all the other stuff that turns a concrete box into a home had to go where the architect thought they should go. In the study, this meant a desk that could neither face the window for the view nor face away to take advantage of the light. Instead, the black mirror-finish desk with the stainless steel legs stood in front of matching glass fronted bookcases that, as far as I could tell, contained a number of lumpy glass and chrome objects and a couple of soft porn albums cunningly disguised as cutting edge nude photography. Still in their shrink wrap, I noticed.

Seawoll sat in the executive leather operator’s chair behind the desk wearing a dangerously stretched noddy suit that made him look like the Michelin Man’s slightly deflated older brother.

‘You’ll notice that you can’t swivel all the way round,’ he said. ‘What fucking use is a swivel chair if you can’t fucking swivel on it?’ He spotted me trying to read the titles on the books.