The living quarters run back at right angle from the office wing, separated inside from the working zone by a huge sliding partition made of rough planks. The buffer zone between working and living is a dining room that is also a conference room. The living areas are in a tapering block, also raised on sprung columns (they haven’t quite worked out what to do with all the open space beneath the house yet. “Put a ping-pong table there?” suggests Till). This block contains the sitting room, a projecting kitchen/dining room (known as “the beehive”) with that inside/outside table leading to an open terrace, and the observation tower, so far lacking the stairs and shelves that will eventually turn it into a library.

Finally coming down to earth at the very back of the site, furthest from the trains, the house turns into a little cube of bedrooms and bathrooms. Very snug, very warm, very quiet - as it should be, since the thick walls here, along with the entire rear flank of the house, are made of straw bales. On the inside they are plastered directly. On the outside, they are covered in corrugated metal sheets - except in one place on the exterior where the metal gives way to clear corrugated plastic so that you can see the pristine straw beneath.

Yes, it’s very eco-friendly. You also get the composting lavatory, you get the big underground rainwater tanks, you get the recycled materials. But this has little in common with a hippy commune in Wales. It is a deliberate hybrid of high and low tech - huge sliding glass windows of advanced design, for instance, coupled with rough-sawn cedar cladding on the garden side and a “green” roof that is starting to sprout weeds. The studio interiors are very clean and modern and workmanlike, but the living areas with their plywood floors are much more ad-hoc. Theirs is an essentially romantic vision of the urban good life, including a visual quote from C.S. Lewis - to get to the main bedroom and bathroom, you first have to cross a bridge, then pass through the wardrobe.

While somewhat hairy in places, this house does not wear a hair shirt. It is real, ambitious, architecture. It nods to the traditions of junk and eco building, but is not quite of either camp. It is an assemblage rather than a style statement. In interiors-mag speak, it’s not the kind of place where, by picking up a few catalogues, you can “get the look”. So there’s no need to try to categorise it. Just be glad that someone built it.

Website: www.swarch.co.uk: progressive architecture from Wigglesworth and Till, with details of open days for their house.