As so often with bespoke house designs, this one consumed huge amounts of design time. "It had to be a sort of experimental house, but at the same time it had to work as well as a Mercedes", is how Wood describes it now. Project architect Heike Matcha, now based back in Germany, did all the working drawings. But by the time she and they had got to that stage, the house had been through several design iterations and back again. At one point, apparently, it started to look a bit like an oyster. As variant after variant emerged, the Blases felt that the strength of the original Grimshaw concept was being lost. "I called Nick up from a gas station in Florida," remembers Frank Blase, who by now in the conversation has arrived home from Igus. "I told him, we really liked your first sketch the best. That was August 1997."

That first sketch, like the first model, is indeed remarkably like the finished plan of the house. Except for one thing. After the design had got planning permission - which took some doing, given that it was a lot bigger than most of the village houses in the area - Grimshaw made the final design tweak. He introduced what everyone refers to as "The Splay". That was July 1998, when he insouciantly broke the design open slightly to reinforce the physical presence of the building within, the architectural cuckoo in the nest. With some trepidation, Daniela went back to the planning office. It was OK. Construction could start.

The side pavilions, which step inwards on plan to create views down the site, were relatively easy going. Not so the spine. Getting that right caused a hiatus in construction. During which time the neighbours saw the undomestic-looking steel frames standing there, and started muttering that an Aldi supermarket was going to be built. The problem was the original, somewhat Quixotic, idea of getting the Spine made in its entirety by boatbuilders in England, then shipped out on a low-loader to Germany to be craned in. Apart from anything else, it was just too big an object for that to be economic. Eventually, a better solution was found: a Cologne firm of joiners, Gewerk 19, made the spine in beautiful segments, like slices out of a barrel, which could be joined together on site. Problem sorted. Work restarted on the house, and this time it was finished.