A house to make Caribbean ghosts proud

The idea from the start was to keep the Charming House as simple and as Old Caribbean as could be. I wanted Felix and the passing ghosts of saltrakers to recognise the place. I also figured that doing things island-style would be a lot less expensive than trying to bring all-mod-cons to a desert island.

There would be no need for air conditioning and no need for glass in the windows. The cottage is perched on the island's spine to catch the Trade Winds which blow fresh from the Atlantic and rarely die. Screens keep the bugs at bay, shutters the hurricanes.

The single bathroom a short stretch of plumbers' pipe from the kitchen sink is fine by me, with a second outside for a shower and privy-style relief.

We can leave the beams exposed. I don't mind seeing the odd bit of

electrical cable winding its way to the ceiling fans. The kitchen has its own footprint to the side of the house to keep the heat and the risk of fire outdoors - old island wisdom - and looking up to the underside of the tin roof is, well, authentic.

Steel shipping containers filled with nails, screws, tin roofing, coils of electrical cable, lengths of piping and our rough-cut cypress rolled their way slowly south from Miami to the customs compound on Grand Turk.

Builder Don Shope had made log houses back in Oklahoma and handles wood like a sculptor. He hired Ronald and Wilbur and Willy, migrant labourers from Haiti, and set about uprooting acacia thorns and cleaning the well. We rebuilt the coral-rock wall which keeps the donkeys out of the yard. We waited for the ship to come in.

Back in New York, I went