We could have rented a canal house, hung a lamp, and waited. The case, practical, private, and slightly philosophical, for doing the opposite.
Every so often a guest asks for our address, and we get to give the answer we like best: we do not have one. No parlour, no studio, no discreet first-floor suite behind a brass plate. The absence is not a gap in the business; it is the business. We looked at the traditional model, premises, lamp, guests filing through, and concluded that every single thing it offers is done better in the room you already have.
A parlour, however elegant, has one front door and the city knows what it is. Everyone who enters makes a small public statement on the pavement first, and makes another one leaving. Outcall deletes the pavement. Your evening consists of a visitor arriving at a hotel, the most ordinary event in hospitality, and no chapter of it occurs in view of anyone. There is no walk home with the night on your shoulders, because you are already home, or as good as: the shower is yours, the bed is yours, the do-not-disturb sign is already on the handle.
Parlours keep hours; buildings need staffing, and the lamp goes dark eventually. A roster that lives spread across four districts keeps no hours at all, someone is always twenty-odd minutes from the centre's doors, at four in the morning as at four in the afternoon, which is why our clock has no closing position. Parlours also make you travel at precisely the moment you least want to: the whole premise of wanting a massage is that you would rather not be in transit. We moved the transit to our side of the ledger. She crosses the city; you cross the room.
The window model and the parlour model share an assumption: that the guest comes to the light. It made sense for four centuries, and the district it built is still the most honest square mile in Europe. But the assumption was always about the seller's convenience, not the buyer's experience. Take the same candour, the same stated price, the same warmth, and reverse the direction of travel, and nothing of value is lost, while everything awkward about the old geometry quietly disappears. The light works fine in motion. Better, we would argue. A parlour can only ever be somewhere you went; a knock at your own door is something that happened to your evening, in your evening, with the city none the wiser and the water outside holding its reflections still.