Q: why is a raven like a writing desk?: A: they're both objects

The famous riddle by Lewis Carroll is not really intended to have an answer, but rather to reveal the incomprehension Alice has of the world of adults. This paper is about a team of model-driven software engineers' concepts of "object" coming up against the building design sector's concept of "object", and challenging our assumptions about the clean and clever solutions that we can create with object-oriented metamodels and model transformation and code generation tools. However, the story has a happy ending in which the application of our tools in combination with pragmatic choices of representations of building designs still produces an outcome that meets our users' needs and avoids lots of bespoke programming.