Quality, and the Book That Planted It: On Layers, Function and Form

Robert M. Pirsig was born on 6 September 1928. This one is for him.

Everything on this site — the second bedroom with no bed in it, the drapes chosen by ear, the scales next to the kettle — comes from a single conviction I have never fully explained: that scratching the surface of anything is a waste of the surface. I want to explain where it came from, because it came from a book, and because the book is on our shelves.

In short: Morrison Court was built on the idea that function and form deserve equal weight rather than being traded against each other. That idea isn’t original to me — I absorbed it as a teenager from Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which argues that our habit of splitting the world into the practical and the beautiful is a mistake, and that what actually unites them is Quality. This house is, in a roundabout way, an attempt to hold both at once.

Two ways of looking at a motorcycle

Pirsig’s 1974 book is a motorcycle journey across America and, underneath that, an argument. He describes two ways of understanding anything. The classical mode sees the underlying form: the mechanism, the reason it works, the parts and how they fit. The romantic mode sees the immediate surface: how the thing looks, how it feels to ride, the mood of it.

His observation is that most people live inside one and find the other faintly ridiculous. The romantic sees the classical as cold and joyless — all specification, no soul. The classical sees the romantic as shallow — all feeling, no idea how anything works. Each is convinced the other is missing the point, and each is partly right.

Then the turn that reorganised something in my head at seventeen: the split is not in the world. It’s in us. What sits underneath both, before the division, is Quality — the thing you recognise instantly and can’t easily define, and which shows up only when someone has cared about the surface and the structure at the same time.

The accommodation industry picks a side

You can see the split everywhere once you’re looking for it, and nowhere more clearly than in places people stay.

There is the purely classical version: efficient, well-run, everything works, nothing means anything. Cleanable surfaces, adequate mattress, laminate that will outlive us all. And there is the purely romantic version: gorgeous in photographs, chosen for the frame, where the beautiful chair is unsittable and the kitchen is theatre. One is a machine you sleep inside. The other is a set you photograph and then endure.

Both are failures of the same kind. They’ve each solved half a problem and called it finished.

What holding both actually costs

The North Star here was to give function and form equal standing — never to let one buy off the other — and I can point at exactly where that gets expensive.

The clearest case is the second bedroom. Classically, a bedroom is a revenue unit; romantically, it photographs beautifully with a bed in it. We took the bed out and made it a room that does five jobs — desk, film room, reading room, siesta spot, somewhere to close a door — which earns less and photographs worse, because it makes the stay better. That is the whole trade in one room.

It repeats in smaller places. The drapes are heavy because heavy fabric absorbs the reflections that make a video call sound hollow — a classical reason — and they also make the room feel like a room rather than a rental, which is romantic. The travertine and brass were chosen because stone and metal age well and feel right under a hand: both modes, one decision. The scales beside the kettle are pure function in service of a purely sensory outcome. The 2200K bedside light exists because of what warm light does to human sleep chemistry, and because candlelight is lovely. There is no version of these choices where one half is decorative.

Layers, and why the surface is not the point

The other thing the book gave me is impatience with the surface as a destination. A good stay, like a good machine, has layers — things you don’t notice on day one, notice on day three, and can’t live without by day thirty. The socket exactly where you sit down. The coffee that was roasted the week you arrived. The record on the shelf with a previous guest’s name written on the sleeve. The neighbours who were screened before they arrived.

None of that improves a photograph. All of it improves a month. Which is roughly Pirsig’s point about motorcycle maintenance: caring about the machine and enjoying the ride are not separate activities, and the person who thinks they are will eventually be standing at the roadside with neither.

The half of the book that decides the furniture

There is a second argument in there, and it may be the one that shaped this place most. Pirsig points out that there are two relationships available with any object: you can use it, or you can be involved with it. The person who maintains their own machine understands it, notices it changing, and gets something out of the maintenance itself. The person who drops it at a shop gets transport. Both end up moving; only one is having an experience.

Almost everything designed for travellers assumes the first relationship. Frictionless, effortless, nothing asked of you — and consequently forgettable. So we built for the second, in small ways that add up. The V60 on the counter is the emblem: a capsule machine would be faster and nobody would complain, but you would not have made anything. Weighing, pouring, waiting two minutes and noticing why today’s cup differs from yesterday’s is not an inconvenience we failed to design out. It is the point.

The same thinking drew the floor plan. Each apartment is divided by activity rather than left as open square metres — a chair positioned for reading or sitting still, a spot arranged for listening properly rather than having music on, a desk for producing work and a day bed beside it for taking work in. Behaviour follows furniture: give an activity a place and it starts happening. Deny it one and it quietly doesn’t.

Which is the practical residue of a philosophy book: not a mood, but a decision about where to put a chair.

The book is on the shelf

We keep a library here, and for longer stays we’ll stock the apartment according to what you actually read, rotated monthly. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is in it — partly because it’s a journey book and this is a house full of people on journeys of one kind or another, and partly because if any guest wants to know why the second bedroom stopped being a bedroom, the answer is more or less in there.

Fair warning: it is not a light read, and its philosophy sections have defeated better people than me on a beach. But it changed how I look at made things, and thirty-odd years later it turned into a building in Gzira. Books do that occasionally. It seems worth admitting which one did it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about?

Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 book is a road narrative and a work of philosophy at once. Framed as a motorcycle journey across America, it argues that our culture splits understanding into two modes — the classical, concerned with underlying form and how things work, and the romantic, concerned with immediate appearance and feel — and that the division is a false one. What reconciles them is Quality: the thing you recognise before you can define it.

What is the difference between classical and romantic understanding?

In Pirsig's framing, classical understanding sees the underlying structure — the mechanism, the function, the reason a thing works. Romantic understanding sees the surface as experienced — how something looks and feels in the moment. Most people favour one and are slightly baffled by the other; his argument is that anything genuinely good requires both at once.

What makes a well-designed apartment?

One where function and form were given equal weight rather than traded against each other. A beautiful room you can't work in has failed; a functional room with no atmosphere has also failed. The test is whether the decisions hold up on day thirty, not in the photograph.

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in Gzira for one or two guests — built on the stubborn belief that function and beauty are the same argument seen from two sides. Come and judge whether it worked, at morrisoncourt.com.