The year I was born, my father, David Hicks, built this alarmingly modern beach house, inspired by the Egyptian temple of King Zoser. The walls, inside and out, are rendered from rough cement and the sand of the beach.

The interiors were decorated very simply; cement beside tables, Hicks fabrics in soft pastels on heavy rough linen, a living room dominated by abstract art and bathroom ceilings that appeared to be floating.

Once the house was completed, my father began to travel the sleepy settlements of Eleuthera retrieving balustrades from porches and verandas of forgotten plantation houses and modest wooden shacks and he began to display them on the clean walls of Savannah, mixing old with new in his trademark style.

All of this before he decided sand was too troublesome. It got into everything, so he never returned to the house he built from sand. But we do.