I think it's rather a matter of design. I would prefer to keep the code as simple as possible: do sorting at database level, and keep the (business) logic as simple as possible.

Assume that your tables are defined some what like this -

house_id	kitchen_id	bathroom_id
1	101	103
2	102	104

image_id	image_name	date_entered
101	image01.jpg	2004/01/02-11:30
102	image02.jpg	2004/01/02-13:30
103	image03.jpg	2004/01/03-12:30
104	image04.jpg	2004/01/05-13:30

Then I would introduce a hash table of SQL statements in the code, indexed by the alias of sorting order. The following code is not tested, just an idea on how this problem may be tackled.

my %SQL = (
    order_by_date => 'select image_name from image
                      where house_id in (
                        select kitchen_id, bathroom_id
                        from house where house_id=?
                      )
                      order by image_date',

    kitchen_first => 'select image_name from image
                      where image_id =
                      (  select kitchen_id, bathroom_id
                         from house where house_id = ? )',

    bathroom_first => 'select image_name from image
                      where image_id =
                      (  select bathroom_id, kitchen_id
                         from house where house_id = ? )',
);

....
$sth = $dbh->prepare( $SQL{order_by_date} );
....
$sth = $dbh->prepare( $SQL{kitchen_first} );
....
[download]