Orlando goes on a massive interior design spree, lavishing huge expense on new furniture and other luxuries for the 365 room sprawl that is his-her ancestral pile.

Then she notices something is missing: people to sit or lie in them.

‘Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough.  People sitting in them, people lying in them improve them amazingly.’

Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992), p. 107