Neil Patterson, McLaren Automotive chief engineer

You enter the building through a glass cylinder that rises smoothly from the tarmac of the car park.

You descend a spotless white spiral staircase, out of sight from the outside world, and push open a towering set of featureless double doors — also white — that give onto a long, straight, white-walled, white-ceilinged corridor. The walls are interrupted occasionally by doors stencilled with cryptic codes and warnings.

At the end of the corridor is another large cylinder, floor-to-ceiling and featureless. Walk around this and doors open noiselessly to a glass-walled lift. It rises through the concrete ceiling and light suddenly floods the chamber, glittering off the enormous plate-glass window that forms an entire wall of the building beyond. The lift stops and opens onto a bridge, with a thick grey carpet that absorbs the sound of your steps as you approach the smartly dressed woman at the circular desk facing the lake.