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Designed by the architect Jonathan Ellis-Miller for his own occupation, this exceptional single-storey house is constructed primarily from steel and glass. Built in the late 1980s, the house overlooks the Cambridgeshire Fens, offering views across agricultural land to the nearby Ely Cathedral. Clearly echoing the American work of architects like Mies Van Der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames and Craig Ellwood, the house has been the subject of a select number of articles in architectural books and journals. The house was the recipient of the 1993 RIBA British Steel Awards.
Ellis-Miller House
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History
Jonathan Ellis-Miller is a Norfolk-born architect with
an established international reputation. He built the
house in Prickwillow as a residence for himself in the
late 1980s.
At the time, Ellis-Miller was working 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 proved obvious
inspiration for Ellis-Miller when he came to design,
with the help of Winter, his house 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 bookThe
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 the
Prickwillow house inCountry Lifemagazine. 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.
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