Generations have come and gone, but the late Eameses have now attained god-like status - as the current exhibition devoted to them at London's Design Museum testifies. But their house was only one of a number of radical experimental homes on the West Coast by the Young Turks of the day. They called them "case study" homes. In the English imagination, the Californian dream merged with the more rigorous modernist houses of the East Coast - notably the transparent homes built around the same time by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. And now, Britain is rediscovering the style. The dream lives on, improbably but gloriously, in the English fens.

In a working agricultural village outside Ely, you will find the style looking as fresh as ever in a startlingly modern house that knows exactly where its roots lie. It is a £150,000 country retreat and studio for the artist Mary Banham, widow of the great architecture critic (and adoptive Californian) Peter Reyner Banham. Not many ladies of a certain age would commission what amounts to a three-dimensional American cultural reference from a young British architect, but the architect in question, Jonathan Ellis-Miller, has a track record. In 1993 he built his own tiny house in the village as a homage to the American Moderns. That is a delicate, insubstantial, thing, hugging the ground. In contrast the Banham House, set alongside and at right angles to it, is much bigger and beefier, hovering on columns above the ground in the manner of Mies. There is, however, a very practical reason for this: rivers run behind dykes close by and once a century or so, the Fens flood catastrophically. In which case, the architect would abandon ship next door, get into his canoe and paddle across to the sanctuary of his client's house, perched imperiously above the waterline.