ISLESBORO, Me.— THE snow was knee-deep on the day Ved Mehta and the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes walked through an uncleared forest here, discussing the view of Penobscot Bay. It was December 1982, and the plutocrats who occupy the island's enormous Georgian-style mansions during the summer were gone. Finding a stretch of level ground, Mr. Barnes paced the outline for a house and said to Mr. Mehta, ''I think once you've got your house here and done the initial cutting, Ved, you'd have to live here and experiment to see which trees got in the way of your view, and which trees you fell in love with and wanted to protect and keep.''

The advice, common sense really, was at the time highly hypothetical. In the first place, Mr. Mehta did not have money to build a house on the property, however appealing the sightlines. And in the second, Mr. Mehta is blind.

Twenty-one years later, Mr. Mehta, 69, has not only a house, but, as with many of his endeavors over the last 46 years, a book to show for it as well. A former contributor to The New Yorker, Mr. Mehta has written extensively, and exhaustively, about his life in India and New York and at Oxford. ''Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island,'' his 10th autobiographical book, published by Thunder's Mouth Press, follows his adventures in the world of contractors, landscapers, fix-its and architects.

On a brisk sunny Saturday in May, Mr. Mehta sat with his wife, Linn Cary Mehta, on a white mahogany deck chair, facing the same waters that he had faced with Mr. Barnes, and in the manner of summer-house owners everywhere, he griped about the hardship. ''Imagine taking care of this bloody place from New York,'' he said. ''With all the time I've taken, I could have written two books.''

The book he wrote instead, named for the southern part of the island, is the story of a blind man grappling with the idea of visual perfection. Mr. Barnes, who knew Mr. Mehta's writing, is highly regarded for his modernist geometric designs for the I.B.M. Building on 57th Street in Manhattan and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Islesboro is a 14-mile sliver of island scalloped with rocky bays and coves, accessible by a short ferry ride from Lincolnville, Me., about four hours northeast of Boston.

Though Mr. Mehta lost his sight from spinal meningitis at the age of 4, he said he had a residual memory of vision. In New York he walks familiar streets and takes buses without a cane or a dog. When it came to designing his own house, something he had never imagined before, he said he wanted no special allowances for his blindness.

''Because I grew up with six sighted brothers and sisters, I never thought the world should adapt to me,'' he said. ''I thought I should adapt to the world. I wanted a house that my six siblings would appreciate.''

With that in mind, he said, he thought of the house during the design stage more as Mr. Barnes's baby than his own. His role, as he described it, was to listen patiently to each of the architect's inspirations and say something along the lines of ''But isn't that going to cost an awful lot of money?''

Mr. Mehta, who had to imagine architectural drawings and intended effects, said he had immersed himself more in the nature of the creative process. Unlike writers, he realized, architects can be at the mercy of their clients. For Mr. Mehta, a protégé of the famously subtle New Yorker editor William Shawn, whose departure from the magazine in 1987 precipitated Mr. Mehta's own, this gave clients too much say.

''I let Ed decide everything,'' he said. ''I never had demands because I never liked demands from an editor. With Mr. Shawn, the whole thing was to lead the writer to the story. Good work comes from the editor being a midwife, not an impregnator.''

Mr. Mehta said his one request was a quiet house, because he gleans all his spatial cues from sound. What he got was a lesson in the acoustic properties of modern building materials like wallboard and glass, which transmit or reflect sound.

The house that Mr. Barnes designed is clean and angular, with sliding glass doors framed in mahogany that let in floods of light and, to Mr. Mehta's dismay, bounce sound harshly around the boxy rooms. The house has an open staircase that similarly carries sound from the basement to the third floor.

''The house is built for the eye, not the ear,'' Mr. Mehta said. ''Everything in the house was done visually. Modern architects are interested in light and air.'' They don't care about sound, he said.

Speaking by telephone, Mr. Barnes, 88, described Mr. Mehta as an attentive client and a character. ''When we were on the land,'' he said, ''he'd follow right behind me and ask me what I saw,'' adding that the challenge of describing blueprints or ideas to a blind client ''was part of the fun of the thing.''

At first, Mr. Barnes had considered keeping the house on one level to accommodate Mr. Mehta's blindness, but the writer rejected the idea. ''He was very strong about that,'' Mr. Barnes said. ''Neither of us wanted it to sprawl over the land.''