The sweet smell of successful project pervades this new-build – finished on time and within budget

You can’t see it from the road. In fact, the only clue to the whereabouts of Martin and Katherine Pease’s Bristol house is a numbered brick gatepost. You would never guess that down the drive, obscured by the solid Thirties and Fifties suburban brick properties that surround it, a minimalist home – dubbed the ‘giant white sugar cube’ by many people – has been so cleverly constructed on such an awkward slice of land.

The reason the plot is so hidden is that it was once part of a neighbouring house’s garden. Nevertheless, in this well-to-do area it still cost Martin and Katherine £425,000 to secure the 0.25 acre site they’d spotted on the internet, sold by a developer as nothing more than a garden with planning permission for a four-bedroom house.

A few years on, and Martin and Katherine’s home has turned out to be one of those extremely rare project: a house that not only comes in on budget – at £350,000 – but is completed slightly early. Not that Martin was particularly surprised; he never intended it to turn out any other way. As an architect with extensive experience on big commercial builds, he can handle the finer details efficiently. Katherine also did her fair share – work took Martin away for a large part of the build, enabling her to get her hands dirty with the construction team. ‘I wanted to know how it was going to be put together,’ she recalls. ‘Eventually, I became one of the lads and by the end, they were even telling dirty jokes in front of me.’

Low humour aside, the resulting building has high-minded design integrity without sacrificing practicality as a family home. So while the double-height living area is almost entirely brilliant white – from the walls to the kitchen units to the sofas – it is all wipe-clean. In fact, most of the furniture is designed for use outdoors rather than in. Come summer, the family will be able to open their huge glass doors and extend the living space to make it semi-alfresco. Far from being slaves to its upkeep, this pale, shiny, clutter-free house is eminently suitable for their kids – nine-year-old Grace and eight-year- old George – as well as dogs Poppy and Jack.

As well as sailing through the project with relative ease, Martin’s professional know-how provided the house with some innovative features like the plastic-based render’s dirt-repelling properties. The snowy white colour remained unblemished, the brown sludge simply dripping off. Applied to the outside walls, this magical stuff makes for an almost maintenance-free exterior, simply requiring a pressure hose-down a couple of times a year. Inside, the paint is clever in a different way: using UV light, it absorbs odours – perfect for an open kitchen.

Other innovations range from the huge and structural to the niftiest gadget. In the former camp, Martin’s beloved steel and timber frame was designed by computer, which meant the two separate components were a perfect fit down to fractions of a millimetre. Meanwhile, the gadgetry includes a type of opaque glass which, at a cost of £1,000 per sqm, turns transparent at the flick of a switch. The family’s first-floor bedrooms boast a wall of this strange material, so they can look down to the living area and beyond to the garden, and a swimming pool. Not only futuristically cool (the glass looks milky until an electric current is passed through it, making it clear) it’s also practical: at night, Katherine can check the children are asleep without disturbing them.

Thanks to Martin’s perfectionism, precious few compromises were made to the finished design. One small concession is the bathrooms: rather than the designer shops the couple had planned to visit, the high street was plundered for its most chic suites. Instead, the couple spent their money on a handful of features that elevate the house from plain austerity to elegant minimalism. Katherine’s pride and joy – a £1,000 tap – which stands angular and resplendent atop a sleek and streamlined sea of white kitchen units, is one such gem. Another is the Diligence fireplace suspended from the 6.5m ceiling, soot-black and curvaceous where almost everything else is pale and straight-edged.

There’s also a wall of gorgeous Cumbrian slate, grey/green with lighter seams, which lends warmth and individuality to the space. ‘It’s from Broughton Moor,’ says Martin. ‘I used it on another build and knew I wanted to use it here.’ It makes the staircase a focal point, showcasing Katherine’s bright idea to dispense with Martin’s plans for a solid white wall encasing the stairs, or banister rail. Their replacement is much more elegant: sheets of toughened glass that sweep up the stairs and run the length of the gallery. Apparently unsupported, in fact each pane is clamped down. ‘The children and I spend a lot of time sitting on the stairs,’ Katherine says. ‘So it’s nice that we can see everything from them.’

Another wall Katherine wanted to veto runs the length of the azure rectangle of the pool outside. As an integral part of the design, extending the house’s clean white lines to meet the dips and turns of the garden, Martin was adamant it should stay. Katherine agrees he was right. Cool and commonsensical rather than cold and clinical, the couple’s grand white dream has just enough warmth and personality. Rough-hewn wooden blocks in the living area are topped with quirky ornaments – a carved hare and a bowl crafted out of melted plastic toy soldiers – while a hidden snug room, where Martin, Katherine and the kids decamp to watch telly, is decked out in warm, autumnal colours and squashy sofas.

The rich greens of the garden provide a pleasingly irregular backdrop to the wall of precisely aligned glass. Though everything on this project – down to each nut and bolt – was planned by the meticulous Martin, even he has found himself charmed by living in his own creation. ‘I’ll go down to the bottom of the garden in the evening and look back at the house and it sort of glows, like a jewel-box,’ he says wistfully. Built with a cool head, the house inspires anything but. On the drawing board, it sounded like another almost-empty white and timber box. In reality, it has heart and soul enough for any family.

Useful Contacts

Builders Geoff Miles/Lee Edbrooke: 07703 437 177
Self-cleaning paint Sto Ltd: www.stoshop.co.uk
Flat roof Warner Contracting Ltd: www.warnercontracting.co.uk
Timber frame Westructure Timber Frame Ltd: www.westructure.co.uk
Insulation Pen Y Coed Construction and Insulation Ltd: www.penycoed-warmcel.com
Windows Velfac: www.velfac.com
Steelwork and glass balustrade Cabot Engineering Ltd: 0117 971 0668
Slate feature wall Burlington Slate: www.burlingtonstone.co.uk
Hi-tech glass Komfort Off ice Partitioning: www.komfort.com
Fireplace Diligence International Ltd: www.diligenceinternational.com
Limestone flooring Tileflair: www.tileflair.com
Kitchen supplier Bespoke Bristol Ltd: www.bespokebristol.com
Worksurfaces Inter Fab: www.interfab.co.uk
Timber decking The Round Wood Timber Company: www.roundwoodtimber.com
Bathrooms Bathstore: www.bathstore.com
Indoor/outdoor furniture Gandia Blasco: www.gandiablasco.com

Words: Kate Riordan Images: Jefferson Smith