It has a cinema, an eight-door Aga, a leather ceiling, a gold-rimmed oculus, an outdoor fireplace – and walls rendered in crushed TV screens. Our writer visits a sparkling giant on the bonny banks of Loch Awe

It’s a sunny evening on the bonny banks of Loch Awe, deep in the Scottish Highlands, and something is sparkling behind the trees. Up a winding dirt track, past acres of densely planted pines, we come to a clearing where a huddle of chiselled grey blocks rise out of the landscape like a rocky outcrop, their abrasive sides glittering in the light, as if hewn from some crystalline mineral.

“It’s clad in crushed TV screens,” says Murray Kerr, the architect of one of the most unusual castles to be built in Argyll since the 1600s. “We were thinking of using greenish slate chips, so the building would look like a country gent in tweeds standing on the hill. But then we learned how much our client hates televisions, so this seemed like the perfect material.”