In the 17th century Cornelius Vermuyden drew two perfect parallel lines across the drowned wilderness of the Great Fen, creating the Old and New Bedford Rivers and, between them, the Washland – a forty-mile-long engineered meadow that still receives the surplus waters of the Great Ouse and shelters tens of thousands of wild swans, geese and waders each winter. Where once there was only reed and flood, he gave Britain its richest soil and, almost as an afterthought, the most astonishing sky on the island: a hemisphere so tall and clean that distance collapses, clouds become architecture, and the earth’s curve can be felt rather than seen.It is under this sky that Vermuyden House is rising.

Lenton and Jane Allpress, fifth-generation custodians of 1,800 acres of Grade 1 black peat, asked for a house that would belong to the Fen rather than merely sit upon it: a principal residence of over 1,000 m² with the discreet, extensive facilities required by an international ultra-high-net-worth family, yet without the loss of a single square metre of arable land. Jane Allpress, a plantswoman of exquisite judgement, required a garden in which magnolias and roses could live unlashed by wind beneath that same limitless sky. The house is conceived as an instrument tuned to the sky.

Two low pavilions intersect at an oblique angle, their masonry flanks aligned to the ancient field lines that Vermuyden’s drainage made possible. Between them, continuous horizontal ribbons of glass are held beneath vast cantilevered roofs – roofs that do not merely shelter but actively harvest the sky, drawing its silver mornings, rose evenings and midnight starfields deep into the living spaces. At dusk the horizon ignites in ribbons of violet and copper; at noon the sky is a white-hot bowl; in winter the low sun slides along the glazed walls like slow fire. Stand on the raised platform and the dome is so complete that the house feels suspended inside a sphere of light.

The garden will be a quiet miracle. A sculpted earth berm, its plan geometry borrowed from the surrounding fields, is crowned with regiments of hybrid poplars whose leaves tremble and flash like schools of fish. Within their shelter lies a ten-acre secret world: a white garden that glows under moonlight, a long rill of still water that mirrors passing cirrus, rose tunnels, magnolia courts and drifting meadows of rare perennials – all made possible by a wind reduction of 80 %. Yet the poplars never close the sky; they frame it, lifting the eye upward so that every sheltered enclosure is roofed only by moving cloud and infinite blue.

From the house the transition is absolute: walls of glass retract, terraces step down into lawns, and the garden rooms unfold beneath the great Fen sky like pages of an illuminated manuscript. The arable land continues unbroken beyond the poplars to the straight, dark line of the New Bedford River and the wild, reed-fringed Washland, where the sky finally meets its own reflection.

All service and ancillary accommodation – staff quarters, collector garaging, 20 m pool, spa, museum-grade wine cellar and secure facilities – is buried within the berm, leaving the living platform above silent and entirely consecrated to sky, horizon and garden.

Energy is drawn from the earth and the wind: ground-source heat pumps, extensive photovoltaics and a series of slender turbines that stand along a three-kilometre axis to the Washland, their blades turning in slow benediction beneath the same heavens that Vermuyden first revealed.

Ellis-Miller has created for the Allpress family a house that does not merely occupy the Fens – it completes them. A 21st-century residence that will take its place among the finest private houses built anywhere in the world this century, and the first great house truly designed for the most magnificent sky in England.

A triptych of models was awarded the prize for Best First-Time Exhibitor at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.