benpentreathstudio

Looking back on last year’s WOW!house - with inspiration drawn from early 19th century Gothic country houses, our kitchen became a room alive with colour, character and craftsmanship, and remains and a deeply enjoyable project for the studio. As always, we are enormously grateful to @designcentrech , and the wonderful @lopenjoinery for producing this beautifully crafted room. Designed by the talented @rupertcunningham @alice.aj.montgomery and @leokary1 in the studio. You can visit WOW!house between 2nd June - 2nd July. Tickets from DCCH /timeslot/wow-house?src=BenPentreathStudio

It’s a bit scary how quickly a year goes by and it’s time for the annual @houseandgardenuk list. Whenever this is produced my thoughts turn to what an amazing history this magazine has, and just how influential it’s been on me and my work. When I was really quite young I persuaded my Mum to get me a subscription to H&G as a birthday present, and every month I’d pore over each page. Later on as I was getting into design more seriously, I loved buying old House & Garden books like this one here. The Guide to Interior Decoration, one of many books produced while the great Robert Harling was editor, was published in 1967 and its pages fizz with an astonishing eclecticism that still blows my mind every time I read it. Here’s a tiny selection. Many of these images are as fresh as the day they were published. That’s why I find them so important - they are fifty-nine years old but still feel completely current and relevant - and for me, that’s the definition of timeless interior decoration. It’s not about slavishly copying one or other historical style, or creating a museum piece, but it is about making rooms and buildings that are going to stand the test of time. When I look at the magazine and website today, I think these are the principles that the small but incredibly hardworking editorial team stick true to today. Publishing has changed massively and now we are saturated in images which spin around the world in ten seconds flat, but every month, when the mag turns up on my desk, I always stop for a while pretty much immediately and have a good read. Not something I can say about every decoration book or magazine. So, thank you to House & Garden for all that you do to support the great British Decoration world. We love all you do and we’re very honoured yet again to be in the ‘101’. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why it’s not a ‘100’ any more, I had this nice email from one of the team “there have been some tweaks this year, with ‘The One’ reserved for the creative force behind the most exceptional new public building in the UK”. That makes sense, and really goes to describe the impact that good design can have in the world.

It’s been wonderful spending a week in beautiful Charleston, SC, helping on a fantastic project headed by Mayor William Cogswell to deliver 3500 new affordable homes for the city over the next eight years. We were part of a design team led by master planner Christian Sottile and his fantastic studio, and including my good friend @hugh_petter from Adam Architecture. Sam Clarry from our @benpentreathstudio was a key part of the delivery! It was just so good to absorb the amazing qualities of this city and to see how we can stitch new development into disused sites and replacing very outdated 1950s social housing stock with better buildings. We spent a lot of time walking and visiting…. Also a brilliant visit led by legendary developer Vince Graham to his new town of I’On, just on the other side of the river (slides 13 - 15) which is a completely new place based on traditional principles - the photos here show streets which are just 25 years old. It was wonderful to meet so many Charlestonians taking great interest in the development of the city which we all love so much! Thank you again to Josh, Christian and all at the city for asking us to be involved.

We are seeking a full-time, office-based Interior Design Assistant to join our decoration team at our Bloomsbury studio. Working within our creative team, you will support multiple projects with strong attention to detail and a proactive approach. We’re looking for someone who is passionate about interiors, enjoys being productive, and supports the team with enthusiasm and care. Find out more details on our website.

We’re so happy to have finally received consent for this new house in a special site in Wiltshire, at the centre of a small farm tucked into a steep hill and surrounded by grazed pasture leading to a beautiful stream. There was an existing house which had been very unsympathetically extended over the years, and working with the planners and conservation officer we worked up a scheme to retain the historic part of the building as a small guest cottage, and build a new house next door. The proposed house is in a gentle Queen Anne style, our favourite, with soft red brick and a clay tile roof, in the classic local vernacular. We worked closely with the landscape architect Pip Morrison on the design of buildings and setting. I don’t mind admitting that this application took so long to achieve that I’m not sure if our wonderful clients will have the willpower to proceed now - planning is a difficult thing these days, and if an application has momentum it feels fantastic, and if it takes forever it can become exhausting for all concerned! I won’t say that we had the easiest process here. I’m sure many architects and designers know what I’m talking about - the post-covid years, and the significant increases in construction costs, have made it hard for all of us. So we are especially grateful for the projects which do go ahead! Looking at these images it seems hard to imagine that it took three years for us to gain consent for the house - but that’s the reality. Either way, it’s a good bit of news at the end of the week that we finally got there! Detailed design by @chrishillse in the studio.

Getting together for our annual dinner, which feels like it’s settling into a lovely tradition now, reminds me of something. There is no substitute on earth for sitting and eating and drinking, and celebrating a good year together, in person. Why is that? It’s because we’re all people – we are social beings. We’re not computers, we’re not AI bots, we’re not units. We’re all people, and I think this dinner, so beautifully cooked and so beautifully put together, is what reminds us that the studio is not just a business, it’s not a spreadsheet or an algorithm, it’s not just numbers. We are a collective of skilled, like-minded people of all ages and many talents who have a shared purpose in creating wonderful buildings, interiors, furniture, towns. Unfortunately because we are architects and designers a lot of it is about numbers or avoiding the terrible things that could happen if our buildings fall down, or the slightly less terrible things happen if someone’s sofa is late for delivery, and I guess, from time to time, it can feel to all of us as if the numbers or the legals or getting things right or avoiding the wrong things can become overwhelming and what keeps you up at night. In fact, this is a real problem of the age we live and work in – which I suppose has become one of incredible aversion to risk, and equally, simultaneously, of ever-increasing bureaucratic complexity. I think an awful lot of us feel this every single day at work. It can sometimes be hard to remember that we are all, collectively, designers, working together to make the world a more beautiful and I hope a more meaningful place. So it’s good to be in this wonderful candlelit room reminding ourselves that not a single one of these talented and renowned architects and artists made an impact on the world because they were good at spreadsheets or avoided making mistakes. No – they all have a common thread – they knew how to think, how to see, how to look, how to learn, how to connect their hand and their eye through their minds, and they knew how to create things or buildings or places of beauty and meaning.

As the old year turns to the new, it’s been a lovely start to 2026 to be able to share that in the King’s New Year’s Honours list, I’ve been made an OBE (which is an Officer of the Order of the British Empire), for services to design. I have received some incredibly kind messages from friends who notice these things but It really struck home what an honour it is when some of our neighbours in the Pier Bar in Rousay last night, on new years eve, offered their quiet congratulations having read about it in the Orcadian newspaper yesterday - it’s somehow a more meaningful thing than I think I’d imagined. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to post about this award here because it’s hard to avoid being a bit cringemaking when you thank an awful lot of people who make up the warp and the weft of your cloth, ranging from my first boss Charles Morris who scooped me up from an art history course and gave me the confidence to start in the world of architecture; the Prince of Wales’s institute which took me in as a precocious and very annoying student and knocked some sense into my brain (especially my tutor Alan Powers) - opening up a world of possibilities that it was okay to design in a classical language of architecture; to my wonderful five years with Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons in New York, who both taught me more than I ever realised at the time. Then there’s my friend Marianne Cusato who now is a brilliant teacher at the University of Notre Dame; George Saumarez Smith and Francis Terry, with whom I put on the Three Classicists Exhibition; William Smalley, who taught me the importance of quality; Bridie who has run the shop with me for all this time, and everyone in the studio - my fellow directors and the entire practice filled with dedicated and happy makers of our craft; all our wonderful clients, collaborators in the worlds of landscape and engineering, and all the builders and craftspeople who execute our designs, be they interiors, buildings or towns. And finally, last but never least, there’s Charlie, who’s done more to make me who I am than anyone. I’m sad Mum and Dad are no longer around to see this day, because it would have made them very happy!

As we settle into that lovely moment between Christmas and New Year, thoughts turn to the New York Winter Show in just a few weeks’ time, now, which I’m so happy to be supporting this year. The oldest art fair in America, the fair is owned by and supports East Side House Settlement - raising money since 1954 for life-changing programmes for New Yorkers in need. It’s an incredible event filled with treasures and I’m so glad to be a co-chair of the Show, and especially for the opening night preview party on 22nd January. I’ll post a link to tickets in my stories both here and on my personal instagram. To read a lot more about the background of the Show and East Side House Settlement, may I recommend head over to the excellent feed of my friend @michaeldiazgriffith (always worth a visit in any event) which explains everything! And I hope to see and meet you there! Ben

We’ve been working on the Duchy of Cornwall’s and King Charles III’s extraordinary Poundbury project for over twenty years now. Over that time it’s been amazing to help to steer the shape of the development, its warp and weft, to create areas with varied architectural character and yet which hang together as a whole; which respect Leon Krier’s revolutionary and beautiful masterplan, and which yet bed the place closely in an authentic English architectural vernacular. Poundbury has changed in these last two decades, as the final shape of the settlement becomes clear, the squares become occupied with shops and businesses, the school thrives, and the landscape settles and matures. Now it’s just three years from completion. In all this, my studio has worked closely with a very dedicated team of people at the Duchy, and local house builders @cg_fry @morrish_homes who have done the most remarkable job to bring the vision to life - but above all with an architect who I’m so happy to call my friend and great collaborator - @geosaumarezsmith . Together, George and I have now designed maybe 1250 (or more) houses and buildings in Poundbury, to the point where, when I’m walking around, I can’t quite tell which of the houses he’s done, and which have been drawn in our studio! Last night the recent phases of Poundbury won a coveted architectural award given by @thegeorgiangroup at their Annual Awards. It’s very infrequent that the Group gives an award to a housing development, I can’t think of the last time that happened. So it’s a real honour for the whole project to have received this recognition of the highest standards of classical architecture, promoted by these awards (which have been running for the last 22 years and have made a huge difference to the flourishing of the classical revival in the UK). I couldn’t be there with George because I was actually down in Dorset showing a group of American developers the project - which is what it’s really all about! Thank you to @adamarchitecture for submitting the project and to the judges. @benpentreath

We were delighted to see Kate Friend’s work included in the 50th Anniversary Kips Bay Show House, last month in Greenwich Village, New York. Architect and interior designer @benpentreath , together with @mandy.pflood and the team at @benpentreathstudio , reimagined The Drawing Room at the Kips Bay Show House. Photography: @reidrolls.interiors Pictured: Nasturtium, Fátima, Portugal, April, 2024 C-type colour print. Signed and numbered verso. Standard: 80 x 65cm, edition of 5 + 2 APs Large: 153 x 122cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP

For the last eighteen months, we’ve been working on an incredibly exciting new project for @fortnums , the amazing and historic shop in the heart of London’s Piccadilly. I was commissioned originally to design new interior panelling and fittings for the building, which had lost a lot of its historical fabric in previous decades. Quite quickly, however, this brief morphed into looking at how people moved through the store, and I began to wonder if we could conceive a staircase which ran all the way up to the top floor of Fortnums, using the central atrium space that had been carved out of the building in a previous refit twenty years ago. We began to sketch and it turned out that we could make a staircase work. Then, in further design development, we realised that we could fit two spiral staircases in the space - what’s called a ‘Double Helix’ staircase - very unusual, we think this is possibly the only one in the country? The most famous double helix staircase is designed by Bramante at the Vatican, and there is another equally famous staircase designed (purportedly) by Leonardo da Vinci at Chambord, in France. In our case, it was just a bit more practical - seeing if we could create flow through the famous shop from each side - up and down, in every direction. Well, after an astonishing effort by the brilliant team at Fortnums, and our project team led by @rupertcunningham with @alice.aj.montgomery and @ja.rennie , the stairs opened today. Construction work started in January and had to be finished before the famous Fortnums Christmas rush… the work carried on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to complete in this very short period, and last night the hoardings were taken down and everything made ready. Please head to Piccadilly to see what you think! And in the meantime, if you can’t get to London, here’s a little taster produced by the excellent team at F&M. It gives a wonderful impression of what we’ve been up to! @portviewfitout @macegroup @ramboll_uk @lwl_welding

It is so often the art and accessories that bring a room to life. A painting hung just so, a collection of objects gathered over time, a vase that catches the light - these are the pieces that give a sense of interest and individuality. At Kips Bay, it’s the layering of these small, telling details that makes the whole room sing. What we love most is how the art, objects and trove of books, speaks to a life lived thoughtfully. Which wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible generosity of our kind and lovely suppliers. Art advisory and collection by the talented @stonemancollins_advisory alongside @osbornesamuelgallery & @lyndsey_ingram @kate_friend , hung upon @robertkime picture rails C1890 pair of Japanese vases in the windows by @klismosgallery Collection of books from @kinseymarable Wedgwood candlesticks, jugs and obelisks by @martynedgellantiquesltd Vases on Japanned cabinet by @francespalmer Maltese glass, fireplace accessories and architectural sculptures by @yewtreehouseantiques A collection of items on surfaces such as @thelacquercompany tray, @pentreathandhall matches, coronation plate, pen pot and candles, @fisher.london crystals, match strike by @krbnyc and bowl by @artistoric_co Hurricane lanterns by @soanebritain Antique scagliola pedestal by @jamb_london with geranium from @zezeflowers #KBNY @benpentreath @mandy.pflood @kbshowhouse