When Wiltshire farmer Andrew Ainslie and his artist wife Meryl started dreaming up a new home three years ago, they knew exactly what was required of the ‘twenty-first-century farmhouse’ they planned to build. In a long consultation with architect Tim Bennett, they listed all the essential ingredients: four bedrooms (they have three teenage children), a farm office with courtyard entrance, low-energy heating, and space for farm dogs, four-wheel drives and dirty boots, plus a family kitchen with a larder. But when it came to expressing the would-be building’s form, they took a more unconventional approach.

‘We gave him three objects,’ says Meryl. ‘A 1953 farmhouse cookbook that once belonged to my grandmother, a cube of green oak, almost perfect but for a natural split in the timber, and a postcard of one of Carl Andre’s Equivalents sculptures.’ The latter, a rectangular arrangement of firebricks, helped convey a sense of something that was ‘at one with nature’. ‘I had tried to write a brief, but somehow this group of symbolic objects said more about our dream aesthetic than I could possibly put into words,’ says Meryl. ‘Luckily the architect understood exactly where we were coming from.’

Set in a shallow bowl of undulating farmland, the Ainslies’ new-born farmhouse is a bold timber-frame structure; in essence, a simple construction of columns and beams, clad in Western Red cedar and topped by a barrel-vaulted roof. Many of its idioms are utterly contemporary – all arcs and squares, zinc and silky Silestone surfaces; a sinuous, sculptural staircase spirals up to a suspended mezzanine floor, while walls of wow-factor glazing and acres of power-floated concrete flooring complete the vast open-plan space. But there is a homely, traditional feel about the place, and a warmth that goes beyond the effect of the ground-source heat pump or the underfloor heating. It looks hand-crafted, natural and, as the brief intended, rooted to the landscape.

‘We wanted a barn-like aesthetic – so you can see all the gubbins, the rafters, the beams, the pig-nose bolts,’ says Meryl. ‘It’s not artifice, it’s just the way the thing is put together.’ Once in place, the Ainslies sprinkled their home with bespoke furniture, antiques, oak, ash and commissioned works of art. And a week after they moved in, they couldn’t conceal their delight. ‘In our old house we never seemed to move from the kitchen table,’ says Andrew. ‘Now we’ve got all this space.’

The house was built to replace a more traditional village farmhouse that had gradually become ‘dislocated’ from the land it was designed to serve. ‘We were on the other side of the road from the farm and, over time, the road had become much busier,’ says Meryl. ‘We were sandwiched between a new housing scheme, the village hall and some retirement bungalows, and though we lived and worked in a beautiful landscape, all we could see from our window was a bus stop.’

The beautiful landscape is 700 acres of dairy cattle and cereal crops, farmed by Andrew’s family since his father bought the land some 40 years ago. ‘It is very much part of my family,’ he says. ‘And I have always felt very strongly about being associated with it.’ But for years he had spent an impractical amount of time trundling through the village between the house and the farm. ‘In bad weather that often meant travelling on foot,’ says Meryl. ‘We needed to be where the work is.’

One option was to follow the classic barn-conversion route – and the farm already provided a group of redundant agricultural buildings. One of them, a traditional red-brick barn, circa 1870, had already been converted into the Rabley Drawing Centre and gallery founded by Meryl four years ago. And the other – in a very poor state of repair – had planning consent for a home. ‘We soon realised that the barn didn’t really offer what we needed in a farmhouse,’ says Andrew. ‘It wasn’t practical or sustainable and, for us, it just wasn’t going to work as a conversion. Fortunately the planners were very happy when we put in another proposal to pull it down and build a new house instead.’

If that seems a little too easy, then it’s worth noting that planners can be amenable to green-belt development – providing the building meets the criteria laid down for agricultural use. ‘We had to prove that we needed to be on the farm for the benefit of our work,’ explains Andrew. ‘And there is a condition that the building has to be tied to the land.’ The Ainslies met ‘dynamic’ architect Tim Bennett through one of Meryl’s drawing-school students. They looked at his work, liked what they saw, and when he said he couldn’t do anything for six months, they decided to wait. ‘About 12 days later, a little pack of drawings came through the post,’ says Meryl. ‘One of them was virtually this building.’

Having sold the old farmhouse to fund the build, they moved into temporary accommodation in a village farm building. Working closely with Tim, Andrew took the role of project manager, first demolishing the derelict red-brick barn and then overseeing the build – key parts of which included digging trenches for the ground-source heat pump, erecting the Douglas fir timber frame and, says Andrew, ‘a huge amount of carpentry’.

The project went remarkably smoothly – the Ainslies can barely recall a hitch – but, as the Grand Designs film crew will attest, this was a slow, deliberate build, a labour of love. The staircase alone, made by a boat-builder friend of the architect, took 10 months to finish. ‘One of the things we enjoyed the most was our team, our craftsmen,’ says Meryl. ‘The relationships you build are very important, and we didn’t want to upset the equilibrium by bringing in new people. It meant things took a lot longer, but on balance, it worked better to do it that way.’

It’s impossible to argue, once presented with the finished product – a perfect synergy of practical farmhouse and beautiful living space or, to put it another way, a harmonious marriage of farmer and artist. On foot you enter a courtyard, via a hand-wrought gate made by sculpture-blacksmith Melissa Cole; or you can drive straight into a farm-vehicle garage, which has direct access to a utility area designed for wet coats, muck and muddy boots. This ‘proper farm entrance’ leads into the hand-crafted kitchen (a very contemporary take on the traditional farmhouse kitchen), which flows into a dining-sitting area with a cylindrical woodburning stove. There is another woodburner at the far end of the building, where a custom-made sofa forms the heart of a family living space. Above, a gallery of simple, compact bedrooms and bathrooms is arranged in a straight line under the curve of the roof. Squares of glass frame rural, Wiltshire views, but none as dramatic as the south aspect, a wall of building-height glazing. The world outside – the light, the weather, the fields, the cattle – is the defining feature of this twenty-first-century farmhouse.

‘One of the things you should do in life is to make the most of the here and now, the opportunities that come your way,’ says Meryl. ‘For us, making the most of this landscape, this place, has been really important. We hope to live here for the rest of our lives.’

To read more about the timber used in the Ainslies’ project, see Kevin McCloud’s new column in Grand Designs Magazine