Architect Jonathan Ellis-Miller on the modernist buildings that inspired his home in the

[Celerity]

Cambridgeshire countryside – a project 30 years in the making

https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/open-house-architect-jonathan-ellis-miller/









The self-designed home of architect Jonathan Ellis-Miller is the concluding chapter in a story of three houses, each a development on the last. The first, built in the 1980s, established his vernacular: the strictly linear, single-storey structure of glass and white galvanised steel. The second, commissioned in the early 1990s, refined the design, raising the floor level and the ceiling height to create a more pleasing connection with nature. They respectively earned Jonathan a RIBA award and inclusion in the Twentieth Century Society’s list of the best 100 buildings of the era.









In 2015, however, when Jonathan came to build this house for his then wife, artist and dancer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, and their son, he had all but left residential architecture behind. Since establishing Ellis-Miller + Partners in 1991, his practice gained a reputation for large-scale projects, pioneering new ideas in education architecture and working on high-profile urban developments. Yet here – almost two decades after his last “little white house”, as he fondly calls them – all of that formative residential experience comes to bear in a contemporary home, continuing the tradition of the Californian Case Study Houses that always inspired him. As it comes on to the market, Jonathan reflects on a project 30 years in the making.









Jonathan: “My first job after studying architecture at Liverpool University was at the practice of John Winter. I was there for several years and around the same time that we completed one of his biggest buildings [the RIBA award-winning 83-85 Mansell Street in the City of London] John said that I would never be a proper architect until I built my own house. So that’s what I did, aged 27 with very little money, in a village called Prickwillow in the Cambridgeshire fens. “The house was in the idiom of Mies van der Rohe and the Californian Case Study Houses and was well-received in the press. This was the early 1990s, during the height of postmodernism, when clean modernism had become quite unfashionable. But still, it won a RIBA award, and I became the guy who built white modern houses.









“I then set up my own practice. Having won two RIBA awards before I was 30, I thought making a living out of architecture would be easy, but it’s an old man’s game – people didn’t really like working with young architects. So, I was fortunate when I was approached by the artist Mary Reyner Banham, the widow and collaborator of architectural historian Peter Reyner Banham. She and Peter had always planned to build their own house, but Peter had passed away before they could carry out their plans. “For Mary, I took the idiom of the white house and, referring more to Mies’s Farnsworth House, we raised the ground plan, which increased the view of the landscape from the house. The goal had been to create something quite modest, but we increased the ceiling height and explored how you could use moveable screens to create cellular, adaptable spaces. It was a great success and voted as one of the top buildings of the century by the Twentieth Century Society.

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[Donkees]

1. Seems like too much visual clutter in the framing details