Not just the preserve of restaurants, a plumbed-in wine tap is a crucial bit of kit in this meticulously planned kitchen in south London. Fixed above a bespoke, triple-width Venetian terrazzo sink, the brass tap has a little marble slab beneath it so you don’t even have to hold the glass while it fills up. Yes please.

This flat in an 18th-century building in Battersea comes with its very own swimming pool. The pool sits in beautifully maintained south-facing communal gardens, which are shared by the flats and cocooned by mature trees. The pool is serviced and available for use by residents throughout the summer – ideal for when lidos are packed to the rafters with the summer crowds.

Positioned under a glazed pitched roof, this pool sits at the heart of a Grade II*-listed apartment building in Peckham, which was designed in 1935 by the architect Sir Owen Williams. In this split-level flat, a door on the first-floor bedroom level leads directly onto the communal pool and gym. Looking up at the roof above the pool, it’s not hard to see why Walter Gropius described the building as “an oasis of glass in a desert of brick.”

This sprawling Grade II*-listed house in West Sussex comes with its very own 19th-century windmill, which has set the tone for later architectural additions. The five-storey windmill – known locally as Jack – is part of a pair, and its female counterpart, Jill, sits to the north of this house and remains a working mill. Equally unexpected is a vast double-height space in the former granary, which is used today as a music room and features a grand piano. Concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling windows give the space an industrial feel and reflect the site’s history.

Crowned ‘House of the Year’ in the 2013 London Architecture Awards, this Kennington house is a surprise from start to finish. It is a bold example of infill architecture, settled ingeniously beneath a 19th-century railway viaduct, with an exterior made from slender steel foils. They give the house an almost organic appearance, while also providing an acoustic shell that protects the living space from any noise caused by the railway above. Inside, the space is all curves, billowing up and out into a three-storey atrium, which connects the various parts of the space, including bedrooms and the open-plan living area.

From the outside, this could easily be seen as a well-preserved Victorian shopfront. Step inside, though, and the preservation extends to every part of the interior in this former Victorian butcher’s shop. The two-bedroom split-level apartment cleverly works around many of the original features, not least in the street-level kitchen, where Grade II-listed tiles adorn the walls, floors, ceiling and counters. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the original wooden payment kiosk at the back of the kitchen, which is kitted out with shelves and a desk.

This renovated stone stable block in Frome contains many playful elements – not least the slide that runs alongside a staircase connecting the first-floor library to the open-plan kitchen and family area downstairs. Aesthetically, the metal slide ties in with the exposed whitewashed brickwork and polished concrete floors, nodding to the space’s former life as an agricultural building. Another unexpected addition is the built-in brick pizza oven in the kitchen, which sits conveniently to one side of the Aga.

Faced with the conundrum of how to keep a motorbike indoors, while keeping it hidden from view, architect Duncan McLeod designed a staircase that slides to conceal it. “The sliding staircase sums up our studio mantra that ‘there’s always a way’. It slides to allow access to my motorbike when I need, and hides it when I don’t,” Duncan told us when we visited as part of our ‘My Modern House’ series. It’s lined with artificial grass, a material that was initially approached with scepticism, but works well in the space. “Our son absolutely loves it. And it doesn’t look unnatural, so I think subliminally you still get a sense of nature inside the house,” Lyndsay said.

Few houses can claim to have a tree growing right through the middle of them, but that is the case in this late-Victorian five-bedroomed terraced house in West Hampstead. Brilliantly dramatic, the tree rises through all three floors and was planted in the kitchen in the 1980s by the architect Brian Muller, who stripped the house back to brick, joists and lath and opened the space up. When the Architectural Review wrote about the house soon after it had been overhauled, it stated, “On entering, most first-time visitors gasp”. It’s easy to see why.

Stepping off the street into Steph Wilson’s voluminous house is an enchanting experience. The double-height main living space has been transformed into a veritable urban jungle replete with soaring cheese plants, a towering cactus and more hanging succulents than we could count. No pumas or monkeys are found in this jungle; rather, the space is inhabited by Ham the Pomeranian, Tomato, a blue parrotlet, 12 canaries and four Gouldian finches. Oh, and there was once a resident snake, which Steph looked after for a friend doing a deep-sea diving course… of course.