This is an account of a two-and-a-half-year journey of discovery, recounted in a narrative which intertwines the day-to-day work of design and building - from siting to blueprint, the pouring of foundations to finish carpentry - with reflections on everything from the way people invest a space with meaning to the question of what constitutes real work in a technological society. At a turning point in his life, writer Michael Pollan found himself dreaming of a small woodframe hut near his house, a place to work, but also a shelter for daydreams. Ordinarily more at home among words than things, the author was seized by the improbable idea of building the place himself, with his own unhandy hands. Pollan dramatizes the satisfactions of transforming a tree into a house, the power of place to shape people's lives, the warring perspectives of architect and carpenter (personified by two characters the narrator calls his prickly Virgils), and the philosophical significance of leaky roofs for contemporary architecture. Michael Pollan is the author of Second Nature.