After leaving the Rome School early in 1929, Connell set up a London office with the young Australian architect Stewart Lloyd Thomson (1902–1990) and began work on High and Over.

High and Over is a country house in Amersham, Buckinghamshire designed for (and in close collaboration with) the noted archaeologist Professor Bernard Ashmole, later to become director of the British Museum.

[1] The house is situated on a prominent hillside with views over the old town of Amersham and the Misbourne Valley on land that was originally part of the estate of the Tyrwhitt-Drake Family who lived at the nearby Shardeloes.

New Farm, designed by Connell, was a more thorough synthesis of modernist planning and construction where irregularly shaped concrete floor slabs supported on thin columns radiated out from a glazed stair tower.

With its large areas of glass, daring cantilevers and thin reinforced concrete walls, it was arguably the boldest modernist house to have been built outside Europe at that time.

In an effort to secure work, Connell entered the competition for the Auckland Cathedral (1940) and narrowly missed selection, gaining second prize with a Swedish style neo-classical plan.

After World War II Connell established practices in Tanganyika and Kenya, designing a number of public and government buildings in Nairobi, before returning to the UK in 1977.

While an outsider by virtue of his New Zealand background, Connell formed part of a complex network of mainly foreign modernist architects and designers who exerted a strong influence in Britain between the wars.

His apolitical and pragmatic position on architecture was regarded with suspicion by the more leftist element in the MARS Group, an organisation that included the Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin.

A large block of flats and shops in St Johns Wood and Connell's post-war commission for the Edith Edwards Children’s Home at the Papworth Sanitorium were uncompleted.

Long championed by English architect and writer Dennis Sharp, the work of Amyas Connell, along with Ward and Lucas, is moving away from an undeserved reputation as uncouth and colonial towards a more balanced summary that acknowledges his early appearance on the international modernist scene with a pair of houses that caught British architecture at a key point of change.