There are no corners. Not one. The first thing you do at Taws House is stand in the middle of the main room and look up, at a ceiling of hand woven straw laid in slow concentric rings on bamboo, curved like the inside of a dome, and the first thing you understand is that someone meant every part of it. The man who built it, a tea farmer from South Sudan, would not use a right angle anywhere. Corners, he believed, hold bad spirits. Buildings, he believed, should grow out of the earth and not be placed on top of it. So he made his own bricks on the ground they would stand on, coloured the walls with the red murram that stains your boots, and taught the thatchers and masons and smiths who raised it their trade himself.

He is gone now, but the house keeps his mind. His daughter looks after it and tells his story, and Omondi, who has worked here for thirty years, knows every brick by hand. Nearly every property at this small crossroads in Maanzoni passed through the builder at some point. You feel that lineage in the walls, which stay cool without any air conditioning, and in the fact that there is no television anywhere, because none was ever wanted.

We stayed several days, and the house gives you a rhythm whether you ask for it or not. The mornings belong to the birds, superb starlings and hornbills and fish eagles putting on a concert a few metres from the veranda, close enough that you leave the binoculars inside. Vervet monkeys pass through looking for fruit, and Peter warns you, not entirely joking, that they are smart and fast. Ten minutes away there is a waterhole where you can sit for an hour and watch zebra and giraffe and eland and the Thomson's gazelles come down to drink, with a leopard always possible and never promised. This is Kenya without the circus of the Mara. Just the country, doing what it does.

Dinner menu

The evenings have a shape of their own. As the heat drops you change into long sleeves and a jacket, the way men did here a hundred years ago, and take a gin and tonic on the veranda at seven while the sun goes. My father lights a cigar. I smoke one too, and we talk like a pair of settlers who have read too much Out of Africa, which is half the pleasure of it. Dinner is at eight, laid formally by Peter, three proper courses with wine on the table and no menu to choose from, just good food brought to you the old way. Afterwards we sit by the fire with a whisky and tell the day back to each other until it is late.

That is the thing about Taws House. It is not a hotel and it is not a museum. It is a home, built with soul, in a country that mostly forgot how. Forty five minutes from Nairobi, and a world away from everything else.

Shot by the father, lived by the son, in a house with no corners and nothing we needed to change.