You know when you start to build a house that a few things are bound to go wrong. They always do. Something won’t fit, something big will get broken, a vital delivery won’t happen, or there will be leaks and cracks. The important thing is to rise above the worries and plough on regardless. Some are better equipped to handle the stress than others. Which is why I regard Ian and Susan Vance, owners of a remarkably good new house in northwest Essex, with huge admiration. Because they had all that – and a great deal more.

Apart from the familiar stuff (giant, hugely expensive double-glazed sliding windows dropped spectacularly from a height, Chinese granite lost in typhoons – the usual), the Vances had to contend with everyone’s worst nightmare: with the house half-built, their building contractor went bust, owing a lot of money to suppliers ... who duly turned up demanding their goods back.

The Vances scarcely turned a hair. This house was – is – their semi-retirement project. He’s 60 and a telecommunications consultant who used to be chief engineer of the Nortel company. She’s 58 and a former teacher. The house was a project they’d been wanting to do for years, and finally – with their three children, Tim, 30, Caroline, 28, and Jane, 22, grown up – it was time to do it. No contractor? No problem. They sat down and decided to manage the whole thing themselves.

The Vances are determined people. Susan knew quite a bit about building, having come from a family in the trade. She even knew how to lay bricks, though that didn’t prove necessary. Chasing up tradesmen became her thing. Ian understood technical drawings and was a dab hand at specifying equipment. They had an excellent architect, David Mikhail, whom they had selected in a competition. In short order, they directly reemployed the best men from the collapsed company, local businesses rallied round, and in two weeks the project was back on track. It helped that they lived next door.

It’s a foggy winter morning when I turn up at the house, but even through the gloom there’s no missing it. Just beyond the brick-and-tile 1930s house where they had previously lived, up on a hilltop overlooking rolling fields, the building emerges as an intriguing composition in glimmering white. It appears to hover over the landscape, tethered to a huge freestanding chimney.

Half of the ground floor consists of enormous floor-to-ceiling glass panels, but at key points it sits on sections of lime-rendered wall that continue out into the landscape to make a sheltered, enclosed courtyard garden. This helps to keep out traffic noise from the nearby M11 motorway. In all, the Vances have nearly two acres of land and are busy creating a sequence of different gardens, from smooth lawn via herbaceous border to woodland glade, plus a seriously large vegetable patch and even a south-facing vinery for growing dessert grapes.

This is a five-bedroom house with a variety of living and dining rooms, a study for each of the pair, and a semidetached workshop (Ian is an accomplished ceramicist) with its own small living space. Broadly L-shaped, it’s an ambitious project: Vance won’t be drawn on the money involved, but this is the kind of house that could cost at least three-quarters of a million – probably less in this case, as they project-managed it themselves. “But it’s not enormous,” says Susan. “We didn’t want somewhere ostentatious.”

And yes, they used to live in the house next door. They’d always wanted to build somewhere new – Ian pulls out an architectural magazine from the 1970s that he found in a library at the age of 24 to demonstrate just how long he’s nurtured this particular ambition. And finally, after they’d done the usual business of touring various unsatisfactory plots of building land, their next-door friends and neighbours on the edge of the village announced they were selling up and moving somewhere smaller. Negotiations commenced, the house was bought and a further patch of land acquired from the farmer beyond.

They like a project: having done various extensions down the years at their old place, they had, Susan says, “run out of things to do”. So they gave themselves a very big thing to do, paying for the building work by selling their old house and buying the plot from savings.

Although this is a classic case of buying a house in order to demolish it – pretty much the only way to build a new one-off home in protected parts of the countryside these days – it was far from replacing like with like. The old house had been very close to its neighbour, and the Vances wanted to place the new one farther away – hence the extra land. Mikhail’s design helped them, Ian says, because he was the architect who best understood that the landscape was as important to them as the house.

Everything was done rigorously: the Vances considered several architects and ran a competition in which they paid three to submit ideas. Mikhail won, with what turned out to be the first all-new house he had ever done.Previously, he was known for imaginative conversions and extensions.

The Vances knew exactly what they wanted the house to contain and to do – opening up to the gardens was a key requirement, but it also had to have plenty of room for visiting family. And although the couple were in their fifties when planning it, they had the future in mind. “We asked for a ground-floor bedroom – in case we reach a point where we can’t get up the stairs,” Ian says.

I hope that day is far off, because these are fine stairs: floating oak treads with a glass balustrade, leading up to a sequence of bedroom suites, and Susan’s study, with beautiful views across this pastoral corner of England. So, for now, the ground-floor bedroom is a guest suite, while the first-floor master bedroom is placed at the end of the south wing, commanding the garden that is all-important to them.

There is also a single-floor section (containing utility room, garage and Ian’s workshop) with a lush, colourful, sedum roof – not only a nice green touch but also great to look down on from the first-floor landing. The walls and roof (concealed behind angled parapets) are heavily insulated, and the black granite floors downstairs are designed to absorb warmth from the sun on winter days, and they work. On the freezing day I visit, the house is nicely warm, yet the oil-fired underfloor heating is turned off – because it was sunny the day before. “It stays at a pretty constant 22C,” says Ian.

With much of the ground floor open plan, the Vances – serious music lovers – wanted a special private room to indulge their passion. It had to be acoustically excellent, with no echo. Mikhail designed this as a separate, slightly sunken living room on the northeast corner of the house, angling the walls and ceiling to minimise sound reflections.

It’s an intimate space that nonetheless opens up views to the gardens and landscape beyond. And it has a log fire in the corner, which explains the presence of that mysterious chimney stack outside (which also has a barbecue built into it on the garden side). Yes, the chimney could have been built into the side of the house, but pulled a few feet away as a freestanding campanile, it adds to the character of the place.

After all the problems – which included their joiners’ workshop being burnt to the ground one Easter, and trying to make ecofriendly limestone-rendered walls during a heat wave, when they needed to be kept damp for a fortnight to set properly – the thing was done. “Whatever they do, they do well,” says Mikhail. “They told the planners they wanted a new house that would be a 21st-century listed building. And the planners loved it.”

Just as well, given how long Ian Vance has wanted to build this house. This was a slow-burn ambition that just had to happen. He has even bought the same classic American chairs – still available – he saw in that architectural magazine all those years ago. So, you want to build your own house? Be very, very patient.

www.davidmikhail.com

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