Going Aloft

Let us take a reasonable fantasy budget for a house build of, say, €150,000. Imagine taking that money and allotting about €50,000 to "dead space".

Most of us would admit to simply parking our boxes of headless Barbies and shattered thermos flasks that we can't bear to throw out a few inches inside the attic door before scaling back down the wobbling stepladder to domestic civilization.

In London, where house prices might someday become as expensive as somewhere as sophisticated as Dublin, house owners in period terraces East and West are moving up rather than moving out.