This holiday home, cut into a cliff on Gozo, is our homage to Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows; an essay on the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the glare of the modern age. Here, that collision becomes a folly: surreal, theatrical, built purely for the surreal experience of staying in it.

The site came to us as a bare structural shell, no interior works yet done: in effect, a pure interior project. The first time we visited, early one morning, the rising sun blinded the whole space. On the ferry back, it brought to mind Tanizaki's essay, and the idea was born. It took five years, and the skill of our client Stephen — a carpenter who built most of the interiors himself, with his own team — to see it through.

At the entrance, a weathered timber volume hangs over a koi pond, concealing a guest lavatory with a hole in the floor looking down into the water. Around it, a gravel courtyard with bonsai and a reflective ceiling sits between walls of recycled hardstone: sunlight filters through noren curtains and bounces off stone by day; hidden LEDs simulate an overcast sky by night.

Two doors, one facing sunrise, one sunset, open onto separate wings: bedrooms behind shoji screens on one side, a living space framing the island's coastline on the other. Our Red Blue Shelf reappears here in monochromatic oak: no longer just a bookshelf, but interior architecture. Artist Julien Vinet made the artwork throughout, including a cinema-scaled triptych set opposite an upcycled readymade made from pastizzi trays.

Above all, this is a project about craft: architecture and carpentry pushed to their limits to work with light, air and water.