It is designed by architects Anthony Hudson and Sarah Featherstone, and it is their first all-new house to be completed since their famous, multiple award-winning Baggy House for multi-millionaire (and now BBC chairman) Gavyn Davis and his family near Barnstaple in Devon. This one is a little smaller, but is no less ambitious. Estate agents will note that it is a bespoke five-bedroom, many-bathroomed house with cellar on a large plot of land in a prime area, which cost around £700,000 to build and is undoubtedly worth more. Architecture buffs will prefer to note that it is a wry and affectionate subversion of the 20th century’s master architect, Le Corbusier.

First - that name. It refers to the ‘drop’ shape that punches through the rectangle of the house. There is an aqueous metaphor here. The Drop contains wet things - a bathroom, a laundry room, rainwater collecting pipes. The house has an eco-agenda and the recycling of water and heat is intrinsic to this. But let’s be honest: anything less like your usual idea of a hair-shirted eco-home, it would be hard to imagine. The Drop, because of the way it is set into a semi-open corner of the house, looks less like a drop of water than an egg in a box. Its rounded shape sets off the rectilinear nature of the rest of the house. This is a perennially fashionable combination of shapes in high architectural circles.

An obvious design inspiration is Le Corbusier’s timelessly beautiful Villa Savoie of 1929-1931 outside Paris - one of the first and still the best of all white-box-on-stilts modernist houses. Corb liked to set organic shapes against his right angles, too, and did just this with his sensually-curved roofscape there. So you know where Drop House is coming from. Inside, it even has ramps connecting some levels as Corb did, though not on anything like the same scale - there is a staircase, set against a slightly alarming leaning wall, connecting ground and first floors here (the tilt of the wall is to bounce daylight into the house from a roof lantern). Besides, the early-Corbusian appearance is partial. The living-room, for instance, is designed as a separate structure on a higher level than the main house. “It’s almost as if the living room is trying to escape from the rest of it,” says Featherstone. And if you wander round the back, you find that the simple white box breaks up into a variety of shapes and levels.