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Savills is now bringing it to the market as a kind of three-dimensional abstract work of art. It has four bedrooms, an indoor pool and more than nine acres of beech and cherry. “I don’t think people will necessarily realise that it is designed by a great architect,” says Sue Mailley of Savills (01494 731950, savills.co.uk), who have priced it at £2.25 million. “But they will see the photographs and think wow. It could be bought by a weekender, or an older couple who want the cachet of a beautiful contemporary home with sylvan views that can make you think you are miles from civilisation.”

^{The original owners didn’t want curtains in the bedroom}

The price tag is a multiple of what it cost to build for its original owners, David and Shelley Grey. They had asked for something unassuming which would “make a frame for the trees” and would be utterly different to their other house, a perfect Georgian rectory. Very quickly critics began to admire it for its “modesty, soul and beauty”.

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McLaughlin remembers its creation fondly. “It was hugely enjoyable and was at some risk to the clients because I hadn’t completed a stand-alone building before,” he says. The steepness of the site created difficulties which he resolved by making the entrance at the top of the house, approached across a small pedestrian bridge where the light could play on pools of water below. It was a distant echo of a medieval drawbridge and moat. “It sits in a gap in the trees and we felt like it was a window in the woods,” he says.

^{The double-height living room}

Floors were made with beech from the surrounding trees, and decking was cut from cedar and put together with huge expanses of steel and glass. “The owners were keen on lots of glass and didn’t want curtains or blinds. They said if they were seen stark naked in their bedroom or bathroom, then whoever saw them was trespassing.” All the same McLaughlin made little seating areas and cubby holes to withdraw to in the huge double-height living room walled with glass.

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Jacob’s Ladder is all about the view and the indoor pool, which extends out like a diving board through the tree canopy. “I used the view as a promise which you keep glimpsing and coming back to,” he says. “When you get to the pool you take your kit off and swim out into the view. I wanted the pool to be lined in black tiles to reflect the trees and the light. In autumn when you get that blaze of colour, the pool turns gold. In the summer it is green.”

^{It’s all about the pool, which extends like a diving board into the trees}

He has always loved the work of Mies van der Rohe, who designed Farnsworth House in Illinois, a fragile glass villa on stilts, as a retreat for Edith Farnsworth. They fell out and she complained that tourists took photographs of her in her undies through the glass walls. The house was owned later by the developer Peter Palumbo, who sold it to enthusiasts for $7.5 million. It is now listed as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public.

McLaughlin was also hugely influenced by Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, a glass cube hanging on the edge of a cliff above Los Angeles which is used endlessly in films and fashion shoots, and is now listed as a Los Angeles Cultural Monument and is on the Register of Historic Places.

His other inspiration was the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, which is now a National Cultural Monument and central to Simon Mawer’s novel The Glass Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2009. “The apse-like staircase wrapped in sandblasted glass tips the cap to the Tugendhat House, so do the spatial sequences which formed a very strong impression when I visited it,” says McLaughlin.

^{Niall McLaughlin}

“The open loggia with a view, followed by a small hall and staircase down to a place where the real view opens up, is shared too.” But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Jacob’s Ladder is that it took only a week to design.

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McLaughlin has since made other wonderful houses including one at Pipers End in Hertfordshire, but his projects are an eclectic mix. He has, for instance, put a new café on Deal pier in Kent, which is tenacious and weatherproof as a limpet, and he is working on the massive Tapestry building in Kings Cross, London.