Working with his chief builder and project manager Cliff Venn, local fisherman-turned-architectural designer Nigel Johnston, and structural engineer David Mathieson, Mackintosh started to evolve the design of the new house by pacing out the site, taking in all the familiar views, and aligning the three portions of the house (a memory of the three sections of the old, extended, croft) around a central circular kitchen at the base of the tower. This is the key to everything. The huge Scottish elm central post supporting the radiating kitchen ceiling beams is the visual lynchpin.

Mackintosh is famously a demon cook: awed friends recount how he rustles up meals for dozens. "It's beautifully stationed so that when I'm at the chopping board I can hurl orders to everyone - even people who've skulked off into the sitting room. It's perfectly designed so that I can look straight through," he says. If his cooking technique sounds a bit like the way he assembles musicals, well, so was the way the design of the house evolved, with everyone mucking in. It's not just the designs that changed all the time: some bits were actually built and then taken down and rebuilt differently, because they did not look absolutely right. Finding a way round such glitches is what Mackintosh plainly enjoys. "It's exactly like putting on a show," he says. "It's funny how often something that seems to be a problem turns out in the end to be a really clever idea. You've just got to go with it."