In Britain, self-build is perceived to be exceptional. Ordinary people do not self-build, only ambitious, cranky, well-heeled hobbyists with time on their hands and lots of emotional capital stored up in their relationships. Channel 4's ever-popular Grand Designs may have brought self-build into the dreams of the multitude but in practice it remains an elite pursuit.

Land can be so hard to find in parts of Britain that many aspiring self-builders give up before the first hurdle is crossed. Although tens of thousands of homes do get built every year by individuals, it remains unusual for house-hunters seriously to consider the possibility of building their own home. Unlike our neighbours in Ireland and Germany, self-build is not part of the culture.

This is a great shame. The surfeit of lifestyle programmes and glossy magazines given over to home design and improvement is evidence enough of our national obsession with the spaces we occupy yet so much of this material is predicated on the assumption that these spaces are fundamentally ill-suited to meeting our needs and desires. Whether you live in a Victorian terrace or a 1970s brick box, the challenge is to make the most of spaces that someone else designed with simple commercial priorities in mind. For the self-builder, by contrast, there is the beguiling possibility of creating spaces that are entirely your own.

Branching Douglas fir trusses burst out of the book shelves

Four years after finding a building plot against all odds in Clapham, south London, I have gained full membership to the ambitious, cranky elite. My heels are long gone, my working life has been turned over several times and my emotional capital has only survived thanks to a very clear delineation of responsibilities between my partner and me, but we now have the very considerable pleasure of living in spaces that are literally delightful. I am writing this copy in the canopy of a mature sycamore and we cook, eat and relax in a bright, richly-textured garden. We didn't push the boundaries, we broke them. This may be the densely-built centre of London but, with a little design ambition, the natural world can still dominate our everyday experience.

I first wrote about Tree House in these pages over a year ago when the first engineered timbers were rising from our slab. Then I focused on our radical environmental specification, inspired by the tree that dominates the site. We wanted to build a house that would 'work like a tree': highly adapted to its climate, made from sustainable materials and powered entirely by the sun. If self-build is an opportunity to escape the compromises of commercial housing development, we grabbed it with a vengeance. I can now look up to the remarkable Douglas fir trusses that support our solar roof and, checking our portable wifi meter, note that we are generating 2.5kW of power, most of which is being used by our neighbours, as current demand within the ultra-efficient building envelope is extremely low. We will buy the power back later in the year when we need some extra help running the heat pump that provides for our heating and hot water.

Douglas fir tree trunks rise up through the house, supporting the staircase

I also wrote about the house and its environmental specification every week for 18 months in The Independent, now collated in book form as a Diary of an Eco-Builder (£14.95 from Green Books, www.greenbooks.co.uk). So I can reasonably claim to have put serious green thought into just about every aspect of the project. In particular, considerable attention was paid to sourcing timber sustainably including FSC I-beams from James Jones & Sons and tree-trunk newel posts from Timber Resources International, hand-picked from the forest floor in Sussex. Yet now that we are here, living day to day within the house, all these eco-issues recede to the background. Electrons get excited on the roof, heat is quietly sucked from beneath the building, the water and energy efficient appliances do their jobs without complaint and the built-in recycling and composting is taken for granted.

Our self-build journey was certainly not trouble free. We were, after all, building a bespoke, over-ambitious house on a constrained urban site. Sometimes it seemed that every detail required serious consideration by everyone involved in the project. But now that the journey is over, memories of the stones underfoot recede remarkably quickly. All those details, all that consideration, and all that emotional and financial investment is paying off. If I am glad that we did not compromise on our ecological specification, I am even more relieved that we did not compromise on our design specification. The house is a joy to live in, not just because the spaces are so special but because the design, materials and palette that define these spaces create a warmth and beauty of their own.

The organic back fence in the garden is made from bits of scap metal rescued from salvaged yards in south London. It is complemented by cool slabs of Kirkstone slate

The engineered timber frame is now buried in the walls but wood remains integral to the design palette of the final house. The core palette, from which all other decisions about finishes flowed, is a complementary colour scheme of teak and slate. The teak – reclaimed parquet from Lassco – is a rich spice orange which is also found in Douglas fir (once the pinkness has faded) and beech, the other wood finish in the house.

The warmth of wood has always been enjoyed in interior design. By placing it at the heart of the palette from the outset, we can now enjoy not only some beautiful wood finishes but also a range of subtle relationships with other materials that pick up the palette in different ways: copper, glass, leather, linoleum and abundant flora.

I really should be banging on about environmental design, following my first instinct to persuade all-comers of the win-win of designing for both people and the planet. Yet all I want to do is write about colour! Perhaps this is how things should be – exceptional environmental performance merely one of many considerations that turn volumes of air into remarkable buildings. I may not have persuaded you that self-build is an easy option for the masses but, if you are going to join an elite, don't be shy. I promise you won't regret it.