“You become very humble and you learn not to take anything for granted, such as your health or wellbeing,” says Nick Apetroaie.

It is yet another wet and windy day in January and the chief executive of Accent Housing is explaining to Housing Today how a formative period in his youth in his native Romania continues to shape his outlook today.

Apetroaie, while studying, was working part-time as an assistant psychologist in one of Romania’s notorious orphanages of abandoned children, the existence of which shocked the world following the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

“You really appreciate what it means to have the freedom to do what you want to do, because in that particular era that choice wasn’t there and people were really mistreated because of a disability or because of where they were born,” says Apertroaie, who still retains a noticeable eastern European accent.