So how should we interpret the 'architecture' of Hitchcock? What has been Hitchcock’s contribution to architecture? Jacobs is at his best when commenting on the most architecturally explicit masterpieces Rope, Rear Window and North by Northwest, but there’s a lot of repetition when he discusses many other films: the house forms a trap for its occupant. Hmmm, we knew that already... You’d expect a monograph on the work of an architect to reveal more of the significance of and offer more insight into the work. Jacobs may have reconstructed the floor plans, but he didn’t do that much with them. The analysis he offers would have been possible without those drawings.

That said, the importance of the study by Jacobs lies in the newly produced material: the reconstructed plans. A new generation of Hitchcock researchers can use these for further study. They can assess the value of the information offered and feast on the many titbits tucked away in the 342-page-thick book: no fewer than 25 sets were built in the studio of producer David Selznick for Rebecca; in The Lodger the home owners hear the footsteps of their tenant in the room upstairs, while the reconstruction of the plan shows that room to be on the other side of the house; the irregular stone walls of the Vandamm House in North by Northwest are not a reference to Frank Lloyd Wright but essential to the script: Cary Grant had to be able to clamber along the building; and so on. All this doesn’t make the book an architecture monograph. Presenting The Wrong House as an architecture book is nice and surprising, but in the end it’s just a book about film.