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, 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.

“From there, after a few years in the doldrums, we were asked to be involved with New Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme. By the time it was scrapped [by the new Conservative government] in 2010, we had become leaders in delivering education architecture, but it seemed to be the time to get out. There were around 50 people in my practice at that point and we pivoted to large-scale urban planning, working on projects like Shoreditch Village and the citizenM hotel there.

“That was where things were at when my ex-wife, Marie Gabrielle Rotie, decided she wanted to live in an Ellis-Miller ‘little white house’ house in the countryside. We found a terrific site where there was an existing property we could live in while building the new house, and I started to think about how to bring my previous modernist-inspired houses forward from the 1990s to the 2010s.

“I was very interested in the notion of the adaptable plan. This would not necessarily be like Farnsworth, where you have a completely free plan, but a kind of hybrid, where there are cellular rooms – to make the house liveable – which could then be adapted in their use by screens.

“Even though it’s really a glass house – all four elevations are glazed – there’s a lot of insulation and the house performs really well. There are PV [photovoltaic] cells on the roof and an air-source heat pump, but the key thing was that we kept the ratio between the walls and the volume to a minimum.

“The construction process was fairly quick and we moved from Hackney in 2018. Like the house, the objects we brought with us reflect a personal journey. There’s some very well designed IKEA furniture and some Dieter Rams Vitsoe shelving, but also a RAR rocking chair that was one of the first pieces of Eames furniture that came to the UK. John Winter had worked with the Ray and Charles Eames in America, and Ray Eames had gifted it to him. Before they came back to the UK, John and his wife visited every Frank Lloyd Wright building in North America, so the chair’s been on quite a journey. John gave it to me as a present in his later years.

“There are also a few artworks by Martha Winter, John’s daughter and a good friend of mine, as well as some Graham Sutherland paintings – Sutherland had many links to modernist architecture, not least his altarpiece for the new Coventry Cathedral.

“The biggest change was suddenly having so much space around us. Marie had started gardening in the postage-stamp-sized garden we’d had in Hackney but she did a terrific job here – it was really a chance for her to explore a new art form that reflected the work she was doing in dance and performance art.

“John put it nicely – these aren’t houses to be looked at, they’re to be looked out from. All this glass really connects you with your environment. You can see the weather change, the direction of the wind – your senses are really heightened living here. Yet despite this, it’s also really private and there are no streetlights. You really get to see the stars.

“In the end, it was much like any project; I had clients who explained what they wanted and I responded. And it actually ended up being hugely successful. For me, the joy of our approach in this house is in how it takes a lot of the ideas from American modernist homes and makes them liveable. This is a place where different people can do different things at different times, but still all live together.”