There are two main living spaces - one at the front and the new raised dining area at the back. Between these, the open kitchen serves as the fulcrum of the house. The three bedrooms were spruced up and given fine new bathrooms but otherwise are left pretty much as before - unlike the original front living room, which faces south and so gets the sun. This was widened by removing a spacious hallway and replacing the old front door with a rectangular window bay overlooking the redesigned front garden. Again, the levels change: inside the new bay, Marsh has made a "snug" by raising the floor behind it. This provides a place to sit in the sun while surveying the slow life of the lane outside.

Marsh placed the new front door to one side, extending the house across an alley to make a new entrance lobby. Finally he raised the ceiling right up into the roof, making a high, domed space. Sliding yellow screens can separate this room from the rest of the house, while other areas are highlighted in bright orange.

A recess for books and hi-fi is let into the chimney breast by the fireplace, a timber-effect floor has been laid and some good pieces of classic modern furniture brought in. The end result is more like an urban apartment than a country hideaway - except that most urban apartments are not as interesting.

Judiciously applied strong colours crop up elsewhere, as in the deep lilac tone chosen for the kitchen. Daylight is cleverly brought into the kitchen and main bathroom from above. But the big event of the place concerns the way the view is handled. Once you are up in the dining area at the back, a portion of the room projects at an angle, with a giant oval window. From the inside, this frames the best view out across the lake. Go into the garden and look back and you find that the wall with its oval eye is clad in undulating, overlapping copper strips, like scales. There's a metaphor happening here and the metaphor is piscine. We're talking fish-eyes.

From the raised terrace outside, a rusted-metal water channel gurgles out into the garden and cascades into a runnel that disappears into the ground. A sculpted figure perches in a niche by a neat, metal-framed timber outhouse ("the world's most expensive garden shed", Marsh remarks wryly). Another metal figure is to be found climbing down the side wall of the house. A path of old railway sleepers leads out to another raised terrace, also made of sleepers, at the bottom of the large L-shaped garden. Finally, a few little tricks tone down some of the less attractive characteristics of the bungalow type: dark-stained timber pergolas serve to disguise the flat-roofed garage at the side, for instance. Even so, a couple of the old windows remain in the less-altered bedroom end of the house.

Set in the heart of rural England on its curious isthmus, the house was nobody's idea of a traditional country cottage before Marsh's transformation and certainly is not now. Such places give architects and clients a freedom that no other rural house type can offer: the freedom of knowing that local planners are only too happy to see "unvillage-like" homes turned into something better. If only more people made use of that opportunity.

• e-mail Marsh & Grochowski, architects
• Royal Institute of British Architects Clients Advisory Service
• Architectural photographer Martine Hamilton Knight