For nearly 19 years, I have kept a flat on the top floor of an 1850s three-storey house in London. From the bedroom sash window, past a giant cedar whose branches move slowly even when nothing else seems to be stirring, I can see a jumble of 19th-century rooftops framed by a plume of plane, oak, ash, maple and poplar trees that go from green to gold to bare and back again, marking the years more reliably than any diary ever could.Filled with light and a sense of open space that’s rare in London, it is, by any measure, a home that I have come to love. It is also, I’ve come to realise, very full, though not in any way I noticed happening at the time. We bought a sofa once because it looked extraordinary in the pages of a glossy magazine, upholstered in some impossibly expensive fabric – and then never got around to buying a proper reading lamp for that corner, so it has sat there for years, magnificent and essentially unused. There’s a delicate portrait of two Balinese dancers, inherited from my uncle, that has hung in three different flats and looked entirely at home in none of them. Huge, sexy coffee-table books bought in cities I can no longer place with certainty. Rugs carried back from shady markets in Lahore and Marrakech. Few things were bought with much foresight. It simply accumulated, one object at a time, until it all became an entire knotted life.None of this mattered until we decided to close the London chapter of our lives and focus more on Asia. The trouble immediately became about space. Singapore already has its own accumulated life – its own furniture, its own books, a decade and a half of being lived in on its own terms. There was simply no room left for two households’ worth of history under one roof, however small or cherished any single object happened to be.