Jill Ellis is one of those multi-hyphenate creative people who is almost irritatingly excellent at many things, whether it’s designing a clever store window, organizing a perfectly art-directed craft workshop through her company, Makeshift Studios, or designing and building a small house in her backyard. When we say that she built a house, we don’t mean it in a conceptual way, like when someone says, “We built a house,” and the subject “we” is a team of hired subcontractors. When Ellis says she built a pool cabana, a hyper-efficient one with a loft bedroom, bathroom, outdoor shower, kitchen, pop-up bar, and multipurpose hangout space, she means that she and her father, Parker Anderson, a retired engineer and construction hobbyist, built the actual cabana.
“My Dad would usually join us for…