It takes brave architects, at the start of the 21st century, to take a blank sheet of paper, begin to design a house, and come up with a solution like this. Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, practising architects and academics, have built it for themselves, as a working prototype. They have needed both courage and patience in the years it has taken to get their extraordinary home somewhere close to completion - at one point, having sold their old house, living in a caravan on the site. Today, they find that it baffles and annoys some of their professional colleagues, but more often strikes a chord with the public. This is very probably because it is a statement about something other than mere style. It feels authentic. And it comes with a manifesto of sorts, which runs as follows: “We prefer the everyday to the iconic. We prefer the rough and the smooth to the smooth alone. We prefer too many ideas to no ideas at all.”