Expensive clothes and fine hairdos can work wonders on even the most ordinary-looking lady dumpling. But there’s a tipping point, beyond which the more a woman spends on her appearance, the more positively hideous she becomes. I’ve noticed it most especially since London’s woman-friendly divorce courts became a magnet for those slightly ghastly, money-grubbing, soon-to-be-ex-wives of international multimillionaires.

Watching them trek in and out of our courtrooms, with their frozen hatchet faces and doors-to-manual luncheon clothes, I feel like I’m watching a freak show. Or, better yet, the final act of a modern morality play. The women don’t only look hideous, they look miserable. Which only goes to show that: a) multimillionaires, though strangely attractive on account of their lolly mountains, are probably duds as husbands; and b) unlimited wealth can’t buy you taste, judgment, a pleasant character or (above all) adorability.

These moneygrubbers may lighten up our breakfast reading, but they give divorce a bad name. Because it strikes me, these days, that an awful lot of other people manage to get through the wretched process fairly gracefully. In fact, as the years roll by, and more of my married friends and acquaintances go their separate ways, I am amazed by the number who divorce with some remnant of their former affection still intact. They live peacefully in the same street, sometimes even in the same house.

I have a friend whose ex-husband lives in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Which is perfect. He never was especially house-trained, so I don’t think he minds. And the point is, he’s still around to mend things, nobody’s yelling at anybody and, above all, the children have to find somewhere less convenient than the garden shed to fine-tune their future addiction to smoking.

With so much divorce in the air, I think I may have spotted a hole in the property market. If I were a developer, I would keep this brainwave to myself. As it is, readers can have it for nothing. Surely, what modern divorcees are crying out for, those couples who are fed up with the sight of each other, but unwilling to be apart from their children, is a new style of Siamese dwellings. Said dwellings should have separate kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and so on, and above all, separate entrances, preferably on different sides of the building. (I don’t care how civilised we are nowadays, it’s never much fun to be too au courant with the romantic comings and goings, so to speak, of your former love.) The children would be free to slope from one household to the other as they fancy, depending on which parent is annoying them least; nobody has to keep packing and unpacking toothbrushes, and baby-sitting arrangements can be easily negotiated. If you were clever and only slightly dishonest, you could probably save a bit on council tax. See? Genius. It can only be a matter of time before somebody starts building these things.

In the meantime, some properties, such as Balcony House, already fit the bill. A 15-minute drive from Peterborough, which is less than an hour by train from London, it’s been on the market for more than year — with the price reduced from £1.25m to £975,000. Even taking into account the depressed property market, I can’t understand why it wasn’t snapped up long ago. It’s a six-bedroom, Grade II-listed 17th century house at the heart of a thriving village (Best Kept Village, Peterborough District, 1992, no less) with its own primary and secondary schools, pub, butcher, post office and grocer.

And, more important for the sake of this argument, attached to the house — with that all-important private entrance — is a large and luxurious separate dwelling with 885 sq ft of living space and a 31ft by 15ft kitchen/sitting room.

The owners, Emma and Bruce Windsor, have been in situ, along with their three teenage sons, for the past eight years. During this time, they have dolled the place up with tremendous elegance and no obvious expense spared. There are limestone floors in the front hall, and exposed wooden beams and original fireplaces are dotted about the house. Underfloor heating has been installed beneath new wooden floorboards on much of the ground floor.

It has to be admitted, the Windsors are selling their lovely house because they are getting divorced. So I guess the rather brilliant Siamese arrangement — with her and the boys in the main house, and him in the annexe — doesn’t always work so well for everyone.

Nevertheless, I’m sure it might suit other divorced or divorcing couples. Also included in the sale are 1½ acres of gardens, two stables, various outhouses, a kitchen garden and a beautiful view of the village church — which would be perfect should physical proximity, in such exuberantly pleasant surroundings, ever lead to a rapprochement and an urge to reassert the abandoned marriage vows. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Selling your house? Think it could stand up to Daisy’s all-seeing eye? E-mail daisy.waugh@sunday-times.co.uk

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