In a final fit of pique Sarah had all the fixtures and fittings removed from her apartments in the royal household.
This means trying out underwear at your dress fittings – not rushing out to buy it afterwards – and standing near the window during fittings so you are getting natural daylight to spot any lines.
The exterior is in need of a paint job but inside you'll find a cinema packed with classic art deco designs and restored fittings.
Where to stay Save on your kip so you can splurge on food at ground-breaking Qbic Hotel (0031 43 321 1111, qbichotels.com), pictured, with aluminium-clad sleeping pods that offer seriously comfy beds, mood-altering lights and Philippe Stark bathroom fittings, from £29.
He is also setting up a company to make window-frames and other fittings.
This will enable architects to build up a design using representations of real products, from steel girders to floor panels to light fittings, while keeping track of costs, structural properties and so forth.
But 3D printing in China is also busy at the other end of the market: extruding filaments of molten plastic to build up objects such as toys, mobile-phone cases and car fittings.
In its high street a 98p Shop (two steps downmarket of the Pound Shop) jostles with hip cafés: L'Atelier, where the fittings are for sale along with delicious goat's cheese and spinach baskets, is asking £150 ($234) for a beaten-up anglepoise lamp.
Homebuyers and builders are too savvy to chuck Georgian or Victorian decorative fittings out with the rubbish now.
Clearly, there is an opportunity.Charming Shoppes has just launched an online tool called Fashion Genius, which it modestly calls the "plus-size fashion breakthrough of the century!" Built by Zafu, a site that helps women find better-fitting jeans, Fashion Genius poses a deceptively simple questionnaire based on data crunched from over 1m online surveys and 10,000 fittings.
The former is part of the plumbing of the global financial system; the latter is the world's biggest distributor of pipes, bathroom fittings and other plumbing paraphernalia.
