What can you buy for £35? A week’s congestion charge? A subscription to Exchange & Mart? Or maybe one cashmere shooting sock. Okay, where does £35 get you? According to my local taxi driver, Tim, it gets me to Bristol airport from my place in Somerset. But then nowhere after that.

But imagine that for the same price, you could see into a slice of your own future; that you could get an inkling of a time and a place that might fill you with joy. Now we’re talking value for money. And I’m not suggesting you blow your cash on a session with Mystic Meg, but that you spend an hour with someone altogether more sensible. An architect.

For £35 you can get an hour of an architect’s time, all to yourself, in your home, thanks to a scheme called Architect in the House (AITH), which is officially part of Architecture Week (June 16-25) but which you can subscribe to now. Or you can register with the scheme on the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) stand at this year’s Grand Designs Live at ExCeL, London.

Oh, and the money doesn’t go to them, poor and underpaid as they are, but to Shelter, which is about as appropriate a charity as you could wish. So far, AITH has raised more than £500,000 for it.

Architects, of course, don’t do tricks with tea leaves. But they do spend seven years studying. And the very best of them are little less than magicians, conjuring materials into order, creating storage and space from nowhere, mysteriously levitating buildings so they appear to float, and, if they’re any good, hypnotising planning officers.

And of course a good architect is freeish. They should ultimately save rather than cost you money, because if they’re any cop they’ll take your vision, strain it through their labyrinthine mind, prod and knead it gently with a pencil and rubber and then bake it at 200C in their CAD software. You don’t get the raw ingredients of a building, you get the perfumed, heavenly experience of the finished syllabub.

That’s assuming you decide to employ one on a proper footing. But what on earth can you expect them to give you in an hour? Is AITH a bargain? Or a gimmick? Or a sales ploy? Well, it’s certainly been good for Richard Dudzicki of RDA architects in London, because he reckons about one in 10 customers who sign up for the hour moves on to become a proper client. Perhaps that works because his practice seems particularly adept at remodelling traditional urban houses.

But that’s the point of AITH: to get people to use architects for jobs they otherwise might try to design themselves or get their builder to draw up. Give an architect some mud and three sheets of corrugated iron, and they’ll be able to fashion them not just into a shelter as you or I might, but into a house, with a sense of place, that offers an uplifting experience each time you come home. Give the same materials to a builder, and he’ll construct a perfectly serviceable site hut to drink tea in. That’s the difference.

Houses that aren’t professionally designed are nearly always clumsy, difficult to negotiate, poorly detailed and feel stunted. At worst, they feel dead, like shopping malls or airports, buildings in which the mechanical functions of the place, like air-conditioning ducts, seem to take precedence over the human enjoyment of the place.

You may disagree with me. You may love the home that you designed yourself with your builder, and you may particularly like air-conditioning ducts. But allow me to tell you to shut up, because if there’s one thing I know a lot about, it’s houses.

And I am utterly convinced that a well-designed one can change your life. You may, of course, have had really horrible experiences with an architect, but swallow hard because again I’m going to tell you that it was your fault for not having chosen the right one in the first place (see my list of top tips).

Andrew Smith and Dominique Dinse clearly chose the right one. They met Andy Nettleton of Dive Architects in 2003, at an Architect in the House surgery at Habitat, with the idea of, um, just moving a bathroom. Two years on and an agreed £110,000 later and, hey presto, their magician had designed them a groovy extension, a 21st-century open-plan living, cooking and eating area with lots of “inside-outside” connection through big, sheet-glazed windows. All in a terraced house in Fulham.

Pointedly, Dinse had two babies during the course of the design-and-build process, which suggests either disastrous planning (unlikely: Smith is a GP) or a relatively stress-free experience. In fact, Nettleton acted as intermediary between the clients and builders. “That way it is so much easier to get some distance,” says Smith. “A third party can negotiate better.”

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