Bolt obviously regards the house - and the collection of other pioneering modernist buildings at Dartington - as an inspiration for his own work. Well away from the often febrile architectural scene of London - indeed, well away from any big city of any kind - he is quietly assembling a portfolio of imaginatively modern houses that are as good as any to be found in Britain. His four-person office in the fishing port of Brixham is working flat-out on around 20 commissions at the moment. Many are, as always in this kind of work, extensions and conversions. But an increasing number are complete one-off houses. And these are very good indeed.

It has been a bit of a struggle to get to this point. After working for several years for one of the best domestic architects of his generation, Oxfordshire-based Peter Aldington, Bolt was faced with a choice. "I could have gone on into one of the big London practices - Foster or Rogers or whoever," he says. "But I didn't want to be an anonymous part of a big machine." He made the Quixotic decision not only to strike out on his own, but to avoid the capital altogether and return to his Devon roots. It was the early 1990s and there was not a lot of work to be had. So he did what architects do: a bit of teaching, the low-budget conversion of an old building into his own home, and - gradually - the work began to come in.

Bolt started to be noticed with local and national architecture awards but his big break came in 2000 with the completion of the accomplished O'Sullivan house, built right on the sea wall of Salcombe. Salcombe is a delightful, characterful place of steep, narrow streets set on a sea inlet and the O'Sullivan family, which had spent its holidays there for 20 years, found themselves with a house of enormous character, even with a tiny glass-floored study projecting right out over the water. The difficult site meant rebuilding the sea wall and bringing in materials by barge, all of which pushed the price to around £900,000 ($1.7m). Well worth it - it's a magical place poised over the waves, bathed in reflected light. The house got a lot of publicity and Bolt has been busy pretty much ever since.

The little sports car is well-used: Bolt regards his patch as being anywhere within a two-hour drive of his Brixham base camp. He's doing another, bigger five-bedroom house in Salcombe now, having just received planning permission to replace a large 1960s house set on a steep slope in the Sandhills area. At first Bolt and his client considered a drastic refurbishment (basically replacing the top half of the house): so drastic that, given the tax you have to pay on alteration work, it eventually made more sense to knock it down and start again. Bolt's new design for a long, low house with a virtually transparent downstairs open-plan living area looks pretty much like a million-pound budget to me. The client is a successful young London property developer.

The completed house I have come to see, however, is more modest: a home for a family of four that cost around £300,000 ($565,000) to build. Matthew and Linda Fox's new house, set high on a ridge near Totnes, has stupendous views to the sea one way, and to Dartmoor the other. In between the two, it commands a lush valley and has a long, long garden swooping down the hill into it. The Foxes - both practising GPs - were living in a bungalow on the site. It's in one of those inter-war ribbons of housing you encounter in the English countryside where the houses have gradually got bigger over the years. The Foxes, by now with taller neighbouring houses to either side and with children on the way, went through the process of considering extensions and alterations until, eventually, they decided to bite the bullet and get ambitious. They moved into Linda's mother's house up the road and saw their house demolished and replaced with something utterly different - though it occupies exactly the same "footprint" as the old bungalow.

It may be comparatively small, but this house has presence. We arrive in late afternoon and the low sun is shining right through the first floor of the house, silhouetting it dramatically against the skyline. A garage is set to one side by the gateway, which is some way from the house itself, separated by a long front garden. So you don't get that thing of cars cluttering up the front of the house. On the contrary, to get to the front door you have to cross a large moat-like pond. The composition stands proud: white-painted ground floor, projecting timber-clad first floor, divided vertically by a rounded staircase tower.

Matthew Fox has time only to shake hands before dashing off to attend to the sick (he and his wife share a surgery in nearby Dawlish). The two boys, 4 and 2, are out though evidence of them is everywhere - as in the private den they've made for themselves, complete with chairs, in the semicircular space at the foot of the stairs. Their rooms and bathroom are at one side of the ground floor, with Linda's study on the back garden side. But the biggest chunk of the downstairs space is taken up with a big, double-height living/dining space with a kitchen opening off it to the rear. Upstairs, a second living area, panelled in light plywood, enjoys the best views front and back - and opens out, via a bridge across the downstairs space, onto a timber front roof terrace shared with the main bedroom alongside. "I love the glass corners of this room," says Linda as we stand there and take in the panorama. "And it's especially good when it's raining."

The layout is very logical. Bedrooms are private - the main upstairs one having strategically-placed windows which look straight out into the sculptural boughs of trees front and back - and only the upper and lower living spaces overlook each other, which is what you need to keep a conversation going. As I discover when Linda asks her architect to make a cup of tea and directs him to the right cupboard without having to shout from her perch up above. Everywhere there is generous built-in storage. Heating comes from beneath the ash -wood floors. There's a back door which has a herb garden outside and which leads directly into a utility room, thence to the kitchen. So it's a very practical house. But the way Bolt has intersected the living spaces inside, and shuffled the cubic volumes of the house outside to break down its bulk and make it dynamic, is architecture of a high order.

He certainly had a gift of a site, as his clients are well aware. It is an enormous plot of land, a broad ribbon that runs over the top of the ridge and a good way down the other side, with the house at the crest. So not only do they have great views, not only are they handy for the Devon beaches a few miles away, but they have their own domain - complete with a couple of pampered sheep in a paddock and a garden that descends in broad steps into the valley. This is why the Foxes, having lived in the old bungalow for several years, wanted to rebuild on the same site. ""Obviously we had to really stretch our mortgage," says Linda, "But we'd never be able to get a site as good as this anywhere else." A big wooden terrace outside - added after the house was completed but approved by Bolt - contains a hot tub at one end, commanding the view down that long garden.

Fox says she has "No regrets. Absolutely none," about staying put and rebuilding in such style rather than moving elsewhere. Nor, for that matter, does Bolt have any regrets about steering clear of big-city professional life. "We're pretty mellow down here," he says on the way back to the station. "It's probably because we're surrounded by THIS" - and with a sweep of his hand he indicates the lush rolling countryside of his parish. It's hard not to feel a stab of envy.

Stan Bolt website: www.stanboltarchitect.com