A house which uses slopes instead of stairs will challenge your assumptions

But Michal Cillik, the 42-year-old psychiatrist who built the 1,300sq ft structure and lives there with his second wife, Kristyna, 31, and their children, Hermina, four, and Vaclav, five months, maintains that he didn't set out to create an eccentric home. All he wanted was "an ultra-modern house" with a movie room.

In 1999, Cillik bought the quarter-acre hillside plot about 25 miles southwest of Prague for 100,000 koruna (about 3,400 today). He hired Sepka Architects after seeing the firm's work at an exhibition in Prague.

The architects first proposed a more conventional two-storey structure with a single sloped floor - because "movies are best viewed on a slope, like in the theatre," Cillik says - but it was over his budget. So the architects had to be creative, says Jan Sepka, who designed the house with his partners, Petr Hajek and Tomas Hradecny.

"With a small budget, we had to make the house compact," Sepka says. That meant leaving the interior open and using more than one ramp, so they could lower the ceilings and make the overall structure smaller. With a smaller house, there was less building material to buy, and costs were reduced. (The final budget was 5.6 million koruna, or about 191,450 today.)

The house was designed in 2000, when Cillik was married to his first wife. But there was a lengthy wait for the building permit and a lawsuit by a neighbour (which was later dropped) - both related to the unusual design. So it wasn't until 2009 that construction was finished. By that time, Cillik had divorced and remarried.

He named the house Villa Hermina, after his daughter with his second wife.

"Many people find the house strange," he says. "But I got what I wanted."

The sloped floors are covered with artificial turf to prevent slipping - of particular concern with a new baby. Cillik, a specialist in behavioural therapy, has a philosophical attitude about raising a toddler in the house: "His first steps will be there, and if he has an accident it will be a small accident, which could be more useful than harmful because he will learn his physical limits."

He adds: "The message of our house is 'all of us are children'. It is an expression of our inner child. And real kids love it, too. When Hermina's friends come to play, they feel they are at a gym or playground, not a house."

He seems equally unconcerned about the challenges of ageing here.

"I have seen old women in Ecuador walk up mountains to get to their homes without a problem," he said. "So I don't think we will have a problem, either."

Privacy is another issue, as only the three bathrooms and the basement storage room have doors, but as his wife, a medical journalist, points out, "We have something even more valuable: great use of space."

The pink exterior was a concession to budget - the planned metallic cladding had to be replaced with cheaper polyurethane that comes in a limited range of colours - but that doesn't seem to trouble her, either.

"Pink is my favourite colour," she says. "It shows happiness."

Some neighbours might not agree. They sometimes scowl at the house, but Cillik laughs it off. Villa Hermina, he says, is his life's achievement - not in spite of the attention, but because of it.

"A lot of men want to be president or a great sportsman, but I am too old to have these ideas," he says. "By creating this house, I feel like the president and a gold medallist in the Olympic Games all at once."

The New York Times 2010

• This article was first published in The Scotsman on November 6, 2010