Few saw it, or subsequent works, such as Fly and Erection, that Pang was involved with “I particularly like Apotheosis, one of John’s,” she says. The pictures of the musician eating soup or playing with his cats lack finesse, but they do show how extraordinarily photogenic he was.May Pang’s celebrity lies in the fact that when she was 22, she became Lennon’s girlfriend. She was his travelling companion from June 1973 to February 1975 in the time known to Beatles fans as John’s “lost weekend”.”I was born to Chinese immigrant parents, who came from Taiyuan,” she says “My father arrived in America first and sent for my mother My parents worked in a laundry in Harlem. She was soon working for Allen Klein, the megalomaniac accountant sorting out The Beatles’ affairs “He’s had a bad press,” says Pang “He genuinely loved the music. He did a lot of good because Apple was in such disarray before he came along and renegotiated The Beatles’ contracts. She failed an interview as a receptionist for a Japanese bicycle company, but noting that The Beatles’ Apple Records had an office in the same building, she asked for a job.

I have a brother and sister, but I was the only one born in America.”Pang did well at school, but soon tired of college. The one I’m wearing says ‘happiness’ and the others are for harmony, infinity and enlightenment. Isaac Hayes wears one, and so do Nile Rodgers from Chic and Phoebe Snow.”Pang will launch the range officially at the Beatles festival in Liverpool in August, and she’ll also be exhibiting her private collection of about 100 photographs of Lennon. Considering her background, she seems, well, almost too normal. What is most refreshing is that she seems an honest interviewee (not common in Beatleland) with no desire to magnify her own role.Pang is visiting the UK to prepare for a launch of her feng shui jewellery – small pieces of stainless steel, worn as pendants, displaying Chinese symbols and her signature.”I grew up with feng shui,” says Pang, “but I never saw any jewellery that would give me the energy I needed and also looked good. Welcome to the world of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where nothing was real, nothing to get hung about.
May Pang was that “secretary” – and we’re sitting on a sofa in a Liverpool hotel.

Be realistic with your ambitions and give careful consideration to the way you hope to live in your house and how you want it to look before you have even laid a brick It will pay great dividends Jason Orme is editor of ‘Homebuilding & Renovating magazine. If a soap writer suggested that a boss’s wife might urge the secretary to get friendly with the boss, it might be dismissed as far-fetched. They are often used by self-builders with an eye for design, who understand the planning and budgetary constraints of a project and who don’t necessarily want to pay someone for design ideas – all they want is a workable plan based on their own ideas. Some don’t even use standard plans, with every house designed from scratch. With some, such as the long established masonry package specialist Design and Materials, ( ), the design comes “free” as part of the package price – worth considering for those who want to avoid excessive start-up fees.Good design will stay with you and your house for years to come; but bad design will be even more apparent. The same can be said for structural engineers and some builders.The last option is to use a package company who will be able to tailor one of their standard designs to your individual requirements.

Potton, the most popular of the timber frame suppliers, has a set of standard plans (you can get a brochure from ) and, despite having built thousands of new homes for self-builders in the UK, claims never to have built the same house twice, with clients swapping layouts around and making smaller alterations to the floorplans.Many of these companies (covering all forms of construction) have talented in-built designers who are highly attuned to the needs of self-builders and layout trends and well worth further investigation. Good design comes from a wide variety of sources but architectural technicians (or technologists – it’s the same thing) are often highly skilled designers who simply haven’t earned the appropriate qualifications for one reason or another. They will be able to come up with perfectly useable and attractive plans and are usually just as capable of producing something very close to your needs. The first and most common is to engage the services of a local designer with experience in one-off housebuilding projects. They will encourage you to develop your own ideas of what a good design for your needs should involve, and analyse your lifestyle to come to a broad concensus on the accommodation required.They will come up with plans and probably see your project through the planning process and then, if you wish, act in a supervisory role during the project. Speak to former clients to see how they viewed the relationship (and visit their finished homes) and ensure that you get a responsive, practical designer who understands your requirements budget.As with builders, you may need to interview many to get the right designer for you. They are usually paid on a percentage of the total build cost and this can vary between 5 and 12 per cent, depending on the individual, his experience and what you want from him (although set fees can sometimes be arranged).A visit to the RIBA website at will enable you to search for a designer in your area, or a chat with the Associated Self-Build Architects ( ) will point you in the right direction.An increasingly popular option is to use a designer who is not necessarily able to call themselves an architect.

You simply can’t have everything you want, and while this naturally applies to the consumer elements of the self-build process such as top-of-the-range kitchens, bathrooms, entertainment systems and flooring, it also applies to architectural design too. A simple rule is that if you want to build cheap, build simple. Draw the kind of boxy house a child might draw (although cutting out the chimney stack will save you money) and build this square layout if you want the cheapest form; every variation in roof shape, every valley, hip, extension, corner and ridge will cost you more from there. Successful design has to be a reaction to a constraint – indeed, some of the very best designs are the cleverest solutions to tightness of space or money – and your budget should influence your every design decision.So, the big question – who will actually design your home for you? It certainly shouldn’t be you. By all means, sketch and mess around with layouts and simple ideas, and give these to your designer to ensure that he includes them in the final plan – but one of the keys to a successful self-build project is knowing when to listen to professionals.There are three main routes open to the average self-builder. As a self-builder with little or no design experience of building projects or the fundamentals of design, you should know only one thing about good design – that you have to be a good designer to do it.