A house is an argument about how to live.

A room that makes three people want to sit down.

The desk in the middle, not against a wall. One hundred and eighty by ninety centimetres, which is the smallest table three people can share without apologising to each other. The room it goes in is an ex-kitchen on the third floor: damp, badly lit, awkward to reach. Every one of those is a reason it works. Nobody wanders up here by accident, so the people who do climb the stairs came on purpose.

The mechanism that assembles people.

A round table with a turning centre. No head of the table, so no one sits at it. The rotating disc means the furthest dish is still yours. You ask for nothing, you wait for no one, the food comes around. It is a piece of social engineering disguised as furniture, and my family has been running it successfully for several generations.

A room you can look at when you have nothing left.

The desk here is finished, the only thing on this whole lot that exists. One hundred and sixty-eight by sixty, with a left wing for the things that are not work, and a notch cut for cables so the surface stays clean. Above it, a pegboard: polaroids, people I look up to, a cartoon frog that says it is okay to struggle. Motivation is not a feeling you summon. It is a wall you built in advance and now have to look at.

Twenty percent of the equipment, eighty percent of the result.

A bench, an adjustable dumbbell, a pull-up bar. I priced the full version and then priced a gym membership, and the membership won by an order of magnitude, which is the honest answer and the one I keep. So this room is small on purpose. The case for it was never cost. It is that the distance between deciding to train and starting to train should be a staircase, not a commute.

The part of the house that is older than me.

An alcove, a table, and stained glass that throws colour across the floor in the late afternoon. I am not building this because I am devout. I am building it because a Chinese-Indonesian house without one is a house that has quietly decided to forget something, and I would rather make that decision on purpose than by omission.

Roofed, but not enclosed.

Four posts, a pitched roof, a low table, and no walls at all. Bengong means to sit and stare at nothing in particular. Bali worked out a long time ago that a house needs one room where the weather is still happening to you: where guests arrive without entering, where you eat outside, where a board game runs until it gets dark. Every indoor living room I have seen is a worse version of this.

Something alive that you have to keep alive.

A recessed basin, a stone rim, and fish. The point is not that it looks calm. Anything can look calm. The point is that it is the one feature on this lot with an opinion about whether you show up. Water goes green, filters clog, fish die if you stop paying attention. A house should contain at least one thing that fails visibly when you neglect it.

A house that feeds itself a little.

Raised beds on a grid. Not self-sufficiency; that is a fantasy that requires quitting your job. Just enough that some of what is on the round table came from thirty metres away, and that the gap between growing food and eating food is something the people in this house have actually watched happen rather than read about.

Play needs a permanent place or it does not happen.

Epoxy over a flat slab, painted lines, one hoop. Half court, because a full one is a different kind of ambition. There is a photo somewhere of a ball stuck in a ring at a court in Pupuan. That is the whole argument. The good hours of my life have a disproportionate tendency to occur on a rectangle of painted concrete.

Two cars and two motorcycles, because that is what a week actually takes.

One scooter is the commute. It is the vehicle that gets used every day without anybody planning it, and the second one exists so that leaving the house never has to be negotiated. The sedan is the family car, which means the real requirement is that four people and somebody's mother can get in it comfortably enough that nobody suggests taking two cars instead. The other one is for the hobby: it goes out on a weekend with a bag of balls in the boot and comes home with sand in it.