Auctioneer Stéphane Aubert rolls up on his Vespa at the entrance to an enormous storage space in the industrial no-man’s-land northwest of Paris. He’s sharply dressed in a shirt and tie, his navy pinstripe suit is crease-free and his black brogues are polished to a shine. He slips off his helmet and smiles.

Cromwell Place is in good company. Spread across five white, stucco-fronted Victorian townhouses in London’s South Kensington, the new exhibition and co-working space shares a neighbourhood with world-renowned art, design and history institutions.

Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals make you stop and think. Not necessarily about what they represent but how you feel. Their brooding veils of colour and blurry outlines draw you in. They’re like windows and doors, portals into another realm, with dusky planes and ragged edges.

“If I’d opened a gallery here in the beginning, no one would have come,” says Joana Grevers, sitting in the sun-dappled courtyard of her old family estate in Cetate, a small village on the Danube in southwest Romania.

Its image of straitlaced country folk has the ability to intrigue and unsettle. What’s the subtext of “American Gothic” and what does it tell us about the American people?

My brother and I knew it, simply, as “the shop”. The meeting point at which we’d gather after school. The place we’d visit for private fittings on Sundays, when the lights were dimmed and the doors were locked.