Or it feels like that, anyway.

This heaven has no golden angels strumming harps, or fluffy clouds. To the ignorant, it probably looks just like the imperfect London world I usually inhabit; my family sitting room, full of toys in various states of disrepair and a piano with cobwebs hanging off it; two  small boys whooping and swinging from things; a cupboard door open so that videos separated from their boxes and children's books with covers missing can tumble out more easily.

But our angel is right in the middle of the room. With a dirty face. In a tattered velvet cap and green overalls. Transforming our lives with a swoosh of sparks and a lot of grinding industrial noise.

OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly. Ever since we moved to this house three years ago, I've hated the hideous Sixties metal staircase that has run up the middle of it since its long-ago makeover by a hippy. The staircase was welded together out of bits of industrial scrap by part-time demons with defective eyesight. It looked and felt like the root of all evil. It was a clanging confection of gunmetal-grey steel, spotty plastic tiles, grey plastic strips with scratches giving clues to the weird colours it had been painted before (yellow, orange, red).

Vile though it was, it pretty much held the house up, so builder after odd-job-man after instant expert swore that nothing could be done to move or change it. That was that. Like it or lump it. And every one of my days in the house has begun with coffee and a long, hostile, hopeless contemplation of this monstrosity - a "this-is-what's-wrong-with-my-life" meditation.

Until now. Because suddenly it's gone.

Where London builders feared to tread, Jeremy Schrecker, metal sculptor and part-time miracle worker from Shrewsbury, glided effortlessly in, spreading sweetness, light, beauty and truth. "It needs some curves, doesn't it?" he said calmly, looking at the crazed collection of broken-elbow bends. And when he saw how the giant pipe at its centre just stops near the top of the house leaving a great big black hole, he said, even more calmly: "How about a sculpture to go on top? I have lots."

It was that easy. He went back to Shrewsbury for a lot of scary looking machines that cut metal like scissors going through paper. He went to the Yellow Pages for steel. And he went to the car for a red velvet skull-cap, and got to work.

By the time I got home at the end of Day One, the spotty grey plastic and broken-elbow stuff had vanished.

Next the curves started coming. A week in, the first flight of steps is well on the way to becoming a work of art. It's as good as having an exorcist in the house.

Jeremy is no slouch as a sculptor. But I put some of his miraculous transformational powers down to his decision, some years back, to get out of London. The purity of his inspiration must, surely, have something to do with waking up in the mornings to rolling green fields, pure air and cream straight from a happy cow.

Not that he doesn't know there is wickedness in the world. Jeremy once worked as a builder in London. So he's seen how people in the city do it: a skimp here, a skive there, and one coat when three were promised. If a household bill needs paying, he's not against doing the odd bit of building even now. Just not like a Londoner.

Without giving away any commercial secrets, I should add that our relationship isn't wickedly expensive. This sculptor, with his passion for materials and shapes and the flow and solving technical problems, doesn't go in for price escalation - the beady eye, the wagging head, the noughts after noughts added to a once-modest total. There is virtue in the world.

Still, you can guess at a vague ennui with Shropshire, and the occasional hankering for the big city. "Everyone's a local hero locally. People know all about you. But it would be great to get exposure to people in London too."

If Londoners did know that this potential saviour had appeared quietly in their midst, they'd be down on their knees praying for him to come to them too.

But now that the staircase has stopped being the symbol of everything that is wrong with my life, I've started imagining a host of other ways that the clouds and trumpets could spread. There's the roof to be waterproofed and turned into a hanging garden, and the ratty old kitchen crying out to become a Vermeeresque vista, and so much more.

So I'm not giving out his number. This is my personal heaven, and I'm not sharing my archangel. Why would I? After all, I'm a Londoner too.

Slices of London: e-mail Urban Fox here