“For about a year, anybody who wanted to see me got a little preamble: I’m on sabbatical. I’m taking photos from my book—this is the only way that I can get it done,’” the British architectural and interior designer Ben Pentreath tells me. “Amazingly, no one batted an eyelid. That’s quite hard to do if you’re running an architectural design studio with 40 people working in it.”
Pentreath’s head-down approach wasn’t always so. After eight years of starting and stopping, he realized the only way that his new book—the first exclusively focused on his projects—could come together was to drop everything else. And even if An English Vision, out now, fits nicely into Rizzoli’s glossy oeuvre of interiors books, it was never meant to be your average design tome.
Pentreath’s eponymous firm works on a range of scales: from refreshing the London townhouse of cookbook author Skye McAlpine with a mango-colored Smeg refrigerator in the kitchen, to building a full-on town in the Scottish Highlands from scratch. Looking back across Pentreath’s work, it showcases more than his taste for Bloomsbury floral wallpapers, and the punch a Greek key upholstered ottoman can pack. Per the designer himself, it’s a collection of things “longer lasting than a lampshade… if you get it right, the street will be just as you designed it for thousands of years.”
“Does it belong on the architecture shelf? Or the town planning shelf, or the interior decoration shelf?” Pentreath asked about the book early on. It wasn’t until his friend and talented contemporary Veere Grenney encouraged him to meld it all together in one volume that Pentreath recognized the scope of the project. “The most fundamental part about me is that—and this was according to [Grenney]—I kind of do everything.”
Another atypical element of An English Vision is that it was fully photographed by Pentreath himself. His justification? He had to be on set anyway, so he might as well take the photos. Prior to this project, Pentreath says he didn’t know his way around a camera. (He claims he hasn’t a clue to this day, even if the images prove otherwise.)
When a few long-planned trips up to Scotland to photograph the charming streets of Tornagrain coincided with non-stop rain, Pentreath understood he had to find a new approach. “I needed to keep my diary completely empty so that at a moment’s notice, I could just be off somewhere randomly—at five in the morning or three in the morning—waiting for the sun to come up,” he says.
So began his sabbatical, which resulted in a book that showcases Pentreath’s eye in all its exacting detail. “It gives an insight into Ben’s wide breadth of talent, from his ability to visualize and plan an urban environment in three dimensions to his intuitiveness in applying the correct architectural detail,” writes the Earl of Moray (a driver in the development of Tornagrain) in the book’s introduction.
The book is organized into chapters with loose themes: In the City, Towns Townhomes, The Country House, The Village Farm. Moodboard-ready photos of antique drum tables in bright green rooms are followed by imagery of the façade of a Neoclassical-style brick building that you’d never guess was only created in 2017. Each project is accompanied by an essay written by Pentreath explaining his involvement (in the case of some historic homes, it took a village of architects) and his relationships with the homeowners.
Across its pages, inspiration abounds—and the project was as much a delight for Pentreath as it will be for readers. “I think a house needs a few years of being attacked by kids and dogs to really settle in,” he says. Returning to his homes, sometimes decades later, only served to reveal their full potential.
“I’m not a very good decorator when it comes to creating the fake idea that somebody has been living there—I find it quite hard to buy what I call signs of life clutter. I really need them to do that themselves with things they love. Seeing how people are making these houses their homes.” he says. “That’s the process I really love.”
