The last few warm days in the office have been a delight, despite the noise of drills, hammers and occasional builders’ exclamations.

The windows of our fourth floor office have been removed leaving us with a delicious temporary airiness.

Meanwhile back at home the same thing is happening. Here the freeholder’s control and our intimate relationship with the windows makes the whole process a little more fraught. Out go the slimline Crittal W40s, in come the boxy PVC. My window dread has been pressing over the last few months as I look around at the many social housing blocks whose composition has been defaced with ‘maintenance-free’ PVC stuffed into small openings. And the experience of far more attractive solutions: the solid timber mullions of Camden local authority flats of the 60s, more recent versions in the weighty timber mullions from Rationel; Fineline Aluminium’s lightweight look, or, even better, the slender steel of a Crittal replacement.

Get the windows right and you get so much of a building’s expression right. O’Donnell and Tuomey’s Timberyard social housing in Dublin is given depth and scale by the use of windows set into the brick streetscape. Even offices benefit from the window treatment: the angled glass-reinforced concrete facade of Whinney Mackay-Lewis’ Queen Victoria Street facade in London, and give a sense of humanity and enclosure with their depth and window-ness. In the same vein is Richard Seiferts’ offices tucked away behind Tottenham Court Road on Albert Place which looks like it is waiting for models to take up pose in each window. Some of the best curtain wall facades work because they borrow the language of windows. I think of the elegant playfulness of the customised Schuco facade on Ash Sakula’s Leicester creative business hub.

And my windows? Putting aside ugliness and that horrible sucking sound of sealed PVC windows opening (not easy I can assure you) there are some upsides. We have now got a piece of high performance technology in every room, trickle vents, multiple ways of opening, twist and turn ability so we can clean them without risking life and limb and vertigo. And insulation (yawn but I will be watching the bills). I have to remember that in some ways it is a good swap for our flaking, rusting, condensation-ridden geriatric metal-framed windows.

Just a final word on windows: defenestration. As in pushing people through the fenestration. One of my favourite words of all time, though not something I would wish on anyone. Even the person who personally selected PVC for my flat.