An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today

Getting into the head of the designer of the buildings we love is the very bricks and mortar (and Doric columns) of grand inspiration.

It’s one thing to view gorgeously styled homes and rooms photographed in design magazines, but it’s quite another to get first hand the delightful details that comprise the big picture.

In this, his third book, London-based interior and architectural designer Ben Pentreath, whose clients include Britain’s King Charles III and the Earl of Moray, celebrates the 20th anniversary of his eponymous studio by pulling back the chintz curtains on 30 of his own projects, many of them never published before.

Pentreath, the recipient of the 2023 Richard H. Driehaus Prize for excellence in classical architecture, tells us in his own words and images—he taught himself to take pictures to document the projects in the book, shooting them with a Canon 5D Mark IV—the intimate story behind each project.

And those projects are quite varied, ranging from towns to townhouses, country houses, and village farms.

Pentreath’s down-to-earth, conversational commentary is humble, philosophical, and insightful. With him, we travel to Bloomsbury, where he and his husband, Charlie, make their home at the apex of a Georgian townhouse, and to a slate-roofed cottage in Scotland, where the couple will soon be moving.

Along the way, we stop off at Poundbury, King Charles’ pioneering new town, where Pentreath has designed some 1,500 buildings, and at the Town of Tornagrain, where he, as architect and planner, is working on 5,000 homes, three schools, a town square, a central park, a High Street, and health centers.

While Pentreath waxes poetic on the virtues and beauty of classical architecture, he never loses sight of the fact that these are, first and foremost, places where people live today, not in the past.

He likens his thought process to cooking: He follows a good recipe then adds “a splash of inspiration and sometimes some luck,” putting his own stamp on the classics much as a musician riffs on a cover of a well-loved song.

Thus, in a farm in Oxfordshire, the home’s new pool house wing sports a bulge–a pizza oven that the client requested at the last minute. Unplanned, nevertheless, it is, Pentreath says, one of the best parts of the house.

It’s not style so much, he notes, that ties his work together but “creating environments—be they large or small—in which we can find humanity, beauty, craft, meaning, colour, pattern, comfort, welcome, kindness, authentic detail, and a sense of timelessness and history.”

Pentreath learns from the past as much as he copies it, something he’s quite proud of. (He is utterly unpretentious—he sees no reason to invent a starchitect signature style.)

In a house in southern England, for example, he designed a pool house that was inspired by Robert Adam’s building at Croome Court in Worcestershire.

“Increasingly, I’m realizing that it’s really all about the landscape and how buildings sit in the landscape rather than about the buildings themselves,” he notes.

He wants his design to evolve, even when that means coming up with solutions that he never envisioned.

In a house in Wiltshire that he decorated, the entry hall, which he appointed with a pair of wing chairs upholstered in blue, a round table and a fireplace fender, was an austere space that was little used by the family.

When he returned to photograph the house for An English Vision, he was more than overjoyed that the owners had added a ping-pong table with a blue top that matched the chairs and a foosball table, turning the space into the hub and heart of the home.

“The best projects are never caught in aspic,” he says. “Houses are a frame for life.”

Pentreath believes that houses should have a sense of timelessness and be loved.

From the lime green flower room in his own home to the Peter Hone plaster casts arranged on the wall in the entrance, hall of his business partner’s house and everything in between–a lamp with a purple shade here, a Morris & Co. paper there—Pentreath gives us a lot to love (and covet).

With the addition of An English Vision—English Decoration was published in 2012 (reissued in 2019) and was joined by “English Houses” in 2016 (being reissued April 2025) —Pentreath has created a timeless trifecta, a true classic, if you will, that deserves a place of honor on every bookshelf. TB