The breathtaking landscape that surrounds Roy and Ellie Milne’s new home on the Isle of Skye could not be ignored when it came to designing the building. Traditional considerations of shape, style and volume didn’t come into it. So, a structure with well-placed windows that framed the scenery was the solution. “The sitting room has the same amount of glass on both sides — one facing due east and the other due west, which means that we can enjoy both the morning and evening light,” says Roy. “And sitting at the projecting bay window is like being outside — it’s wonderful.”

According to the architect, Alan Dickson of the Dunvegan-based firm Rural Design, the site offers “an embarrassment of riches”. “At one side of the house there are views over to the Western Isles, on another is Loch Dunvegan and on another is the craggy silhouette of the Cuillins.

“Making contact with and connecting to all these elements, as well as taking advantage of the light, was the starting point for the design of the house. So, in a sense what the house looked like was less important.”

That’s not to say the Milnes’ house is short on looks. It’s a simple, landscape-hugging, larch-clad house that complements the countryside around it. Extra depth has been created with a lean-to and projecting window, and all is contained below a tight-pitch, corrugated-fibre cement roof.

All in all, it’s a handsome contemporary take on the traditional rural sheds and longhouses that punctuate the island landscape. Indeed, Roy and Ellie have elected to call their new home simply the Longhouse. Dickson characterises it as an exercise in “complicated simplicity”.

The Longhouse is built on croft land that has been in Ellie’s family for generations. The couple’s long association with the area began when they spent their honeymoon there and has come full circle as the location for their retirement home.

The project may have taken a few years of gestation and planning, but the result is exactly what they had in mind.

Their association with Dickson happened after they spotted the Rural Design office while strolling around Dunvegan. When they spoke to the architect about their initial thoughts, things started to gel. “It was a happy accident, meeting Alan,” says Roy. “We were keen to use local people as far as possible to design and build the house, as we were based in Edinburgh at the time and wouldn’t have wanted to take on this task. We really just fell over the practice when we were in Dunvegan.

“When we first spoke to Alan about our desire to have a wooden house with a corrugated roof, he got up, went away and came back with a picture of a similar project. It was his own house on Skye.

“It just so happened that the design of his house was very much like the one that Ellie and I had built when we lived in New Zealand, many years ago.”

As a result, the Longhouse began to take shape. Roy, an architect himself, says that he resisted the temptation to co-design, “We were adamant that we’d be hands-off on this occasion,” he says. In the event, the planning process was painless and construction was carried out as a negotiated project with a local contractor. The project took nearly a year to complete.

The finished home is a single-storey timber-frame building with attic space. The frame is made from flitch beams — a timber sandwich with steel in the middle for extra support. This traditional method of building, with a large frame up the middle of the house and the rafters and roof sitting on top of the beams, means that the construction elements are exposed.

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