At home: Simon Walker, head of the Institute of Directors

When Simon Walker, director-general of the Institute of Directors, first saw his west London home in 1994 it was a ruin. Nevertheless, both he and his then eight-year-old son fell in love with it. “My son,” he recalls, “went back home and said to my wife, ‘I’ve just seen the house we’re going to buy’. He loved it because there’s a tree in the back garden and he thought he could spend all his time climbing it.”

Walker had no such ambitions. What attracted him most to the property was the setting, overlooking Brook Green and its tennis courts. “It makes the house open. The light is fantastic,” he says, “and living on a green means there are no houses on the other side of the road, it automatically doubles the parking places.”