Jonathan Ellis-Miller is a Norfolk-born architect with
an established international reputation.

At the time of designing the Banham Studio, Ellis-Miller had just established his own practice having worked previously for John Winter, an architect renowned for his knowledge and enthusiasm for the American Modernist style. The famed ‘Case Study’ houses built in California in the 1940s and 50s by architects such as Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, Charles and Ray Eames and Richard Neutra were clearly beacons for Ellis-Miller when he came to design, with the help of Winter, the buildings at Prickwillow. The use of a simple steel and glass construction is the most obvious reference that the Prickwillow house makes to these Californian houses, but one can also point to the low-lying nature of the house and its integration into the landscape. Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House near Chicago (1946-51) also provided a source of inspiration for Ellis-Miller, although in the architect’s own words Ellis-Miller attempted to avoid the “exquisite excesses” of the Farnsworth House by building something far easier, and less costly, to construct and maintain.

“The ‘Case Study’ dream lives on, improbably but gloriously, in the English fens”, wrote architecture critic Hugh Pearman of the Prickwillow house. “In a working agricultural village outside
Ely you will find the style looking as fresh as ever”.
Architectural historian Alan Powers, in his book The
Twentieth Century House in Britain, also refers to the
house as being “in the tradition of lightweight American Modernism”.

In 2003, Jeremy Melvin wrote an extensive study of Ellis-Miller's Prickwillow house in Country Life magazine, much of which is also relevant to the Studio. He quotes Ellis-Miller as describing the house as “an exercise in how to build something practical and elegant”. Melvin writes that “three bays of a slender, steel frame establish the form [of the house], and the layout of the spaces inside is simple and rational”.
He goes on to say that this “rationality” is combined with something more “primordial” (the house is “about being connected to the ground”, Ellis-Miller once said), which forms “an interplay with the needs and emotions of human habitation”.

The landscape of the Fens, like that of California, is known for its wide skies. Ellis-Miller has embraced this at the Prickwillow house with a floor-to-ceiling glass façade that allows magnificent panoramic views, both day and night.