Wet or dry, when you're sitting high up there you always feel as if the place is about to sail off across the flat black landscape. The height of the new house - it not only starts above ground level, but has high studio ceilings as well - gives it an undeniable presence despite the fact that it is single-storey, a modernist bungalow. "The people in the village describe my own house these days as the garden shed," says Ellis-Miller, and you can see why: for five years his own little home was the main event, now it has cheerfully yielded precedence to its neighbour. The fact that he is creating a shared garden between the two only reinforces what is a very architectural sense of hierarchy.
Ellis-Miller is an academic as well as a pragmatist. He is visiting professor of architecture at the University of Greenwich, runs his practice from Cambridge and will soon open a London office. He is very down-to-earth about his buildings. In a way, he says, his American-influenced houses are not so different from the self-built homes people used to make out of old railway wagons and the like on shingle beaches and odd, forgotten corners of the countryside. Nor is he wedded to this aesthetic: he has also produced curvaceous, almost organic house extensions and sees nothing wrong in working with the historic vernacular styles of an area - so long as it is done properly.
Even so, the Banham house is very much the work of an architect who knows and loves the American school of the 1940s and 1950s, and its English equivalents. There is a panel of heat-catching industrial tanks set behind glass in one wall, for instance. This is a sly reference to the nearby Hunstanton School by Alison and Peter Smithson, a Miesian exercise of the 1950s which made a virtue out of exactly the same tanks. As the Smithsons were great pals of the Banhams, the visual link has a social reason. But nobody needs to know that - probably, only about six people in the country would ever notice anyway.
Mary Banham can drive her car up a ramp alongside the house and get out right by her front door - no struggling up the garden path for her. The studio with its white-painted steel beams makes maximum use of the huge skies and wonderful light of East Anglia. Its huge sliding glass windows look across the Fens to Ely Cathedral. Its industrial grey-painted floor is becoming spattered with paint from Banham's canvases, as intended. In summer, automatic external venetian blinds keep things cool. In winter, Banham can pull two huge blue doors across the space to create a small, cosy living-room with an open fire at the back and that heat-trapping tank wall at the front. There's a little kitchen, a shower room, a sleeping area, and that's it: one person's modernist rural retreat. Mind you, the place is great for parties, and Banham throws good ones there: what else do you expect from a style invented by sybaritic post-war Californians?
