I had thought that, between gigs, George had slumped down backstage with a complimentary hotel biro, scratched out a verse or two, then took them to the band where they all sorted out the chord sequences. “Money for old rope” my father would say. It wasn’t like that at all. There was a niggling sort of an idea that Harrison carried around for months before making a rough draft with a couple of mates. Then followed a period of assembling mass guitarists, keyboard players, percussionists and the frightening ‘wall of sound’ producer Phil Spector to make a studio version. This was set aside in favour of a reggae version, courtesy of another gang of mates. This, too, was abandoned and Harrison retreated to the studio to reassemble the morass of tapes and pretty much recorded everything from scratch again, using the then nascent art of tape looping to fill the gaps. I was elated.

It’s drawing a long bow to compare my scratching with Harrison’s song but there is something in the emergence of a finished butterfly from the chrysalis of false starts, creative culs-de-sac and laboured assembly of ideas that is also a feature of designing a house. Am I alone in this? Do those beautiful houses whose images we see crowding each other out in social media feeds and magazines leap perfectly formed onto the page or screen, requiring only the ordering and definition of documentation before dispatch to the site? The colour-graded world of the ‘net’ suggests such immaculate conception but I suspect each carefully composed image is a distillation of blood, sweat and tears: evidence of unseen backroom agony and ecstasy.

Renzo Piano has referred to the plan communicating order and the section as the place of beauty. It is a lovely taxonomy that suggests that perhaps one might start at one or another as one picks up the tools at the start of a project. Much as I love the idea of the sublime section giving rise to a glorious building, my more common experience of manipulating the section in residential work has involved wrangling building geometry into a peaceful accord with the accursed height in relation to boundary constraints, rolling topography, building structure and the dimensions of the human frame.

If the beautiful section is circumscribed by pesky rules protecting neighbours’ sunlight, the plan is often a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Though the controls of side yards, outlook courts, site coverage and turning radii squeeze our hopes and dreams, the real tribulations of making the well-ordered plan are an unholy construct of the psyche as one seeks to balance a soup of ambitions, expectations, regulations and budgets. At each project, I enter this fray as if it were the slough of despond from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a place where “… there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place…”

David Mitchell, commenting on the terrors of the blank sheet of paper at the start of a new project, explained that “just because you have done it in the past, there’s no reason to suppose you can do it again”. Of course, he could and did many times, with great success, but that doesn’t help me too much as the optimistic celebration of being commissioned gives rise to the appalling realisation that I have to confront the demons again and sing for my supper.

Long ago, I wrote kitchen reviews for a food magazine and to fasttrack the process, I asked those responsible for their designs to cook me a meal. Ron Sang was a wonderful subject: a fine architect and publisher, a great cook, a gracious host and wonderfully open in his discussion of how he went about designing in general, and his kitchen in particular. At the time, Bossley and I would not assume anything was to be included in a house, even a kitchen; the argument was that investing the kitchen cost in the then recently unshackled financial markets, rather than in four by two, Formica and Fisher & Paykel appliances, might provide an à la carte meal in the city every night. It was an argument that suggested a strategy of approaching every design without the constraints of precedent, but Ron’s reply set me on my heels with its sensible directness; “I just think of the last one I designed and improve at least one thing”.

His answer was like scales falling from my eyes. Here was the way to make an evolving body of work: one house providing a foundation and framework for critique and the evolution of the next. One might respond to the particularities of sun, site and context but, at least, the client might visit an earlier project and have some idea about what the design process might deliver for them. For all the appeal of that generous advice, I still struggle to transfer consciously the experience of one project to another, though I acknowledge the appearance of a few repeating motifs over the last few decades.

The strategy of serial invention is not a very good business model; my clients might now have a reasonable chance of getting a kitchen but can be certain of precious little else. This has led to a rather erratic oeuvre. Each time, I struggle for ideas, values or qualities that will resonate with unspoken hopes and dreams for the project. To the exasperation of those who work with me, I am not sure what the goal is nor do I even recognise it when we have achieved it. Ideas, words and sketches tumble over one another: the plan an imperfect armature, a compression of three-dimensional thinking as sectional beauty is held back, implicit in the flurry of lines ordering room relationships. Occasionally, sections are explored in the margins, the drawings suggesting tracings of broken and incomplete strands of DNA, awaiting assembly.

I switch between media, at times favouring the iPad’s hosting of rapid iterative diagramming and the accretion of layer upon layer; at others, I seize on the drag of graphite and nib across paper and the gorgeous flooding of watercolour. This is a time of niggling ideas, part seen in loose sketches and paintings as I struggle for clarity fortified by the memory of others whose work shares the relentless search for an elusive idea. John Wardle’s thick overlay of lines as he sought to define the curve of his Boneo country house and the beautiful watercolours of Steven Holl are each witness to the restless exploration of ideas and the search for a line, a plane or a volume that will guide the work of design development ahead.

It is a comfort knowing that many others have battled demons and that, just as those lovely images of projects popping up on our screens are the result of hard graft, those three or four minutes of George Harrison’s music result from similar false starts, revisions and abandoned variations.

Counsellors report that architects, be they students or working project architects, form an inordinate percentage of clients beset with, apart from the more familiar range of contemporary malaises, anxieties arising from the work itself. To those of you who occasionally feel, as I do, that our aspirations are unmatched by ability, it may be cold comfort to know you are not alone in the world of creative endeavour and maybe we should kick back, put in the earbuds, and enjoy the result of someone else’s angst.