Ben Pentreath does it all [Rebroadcast]

0:03This is Business of Home. I'm your host, Dennis Scully. Every week I'll be speaking with leaders and innovators from all corners of the home industry. My guest this week is Ben Pentreth. In an era when most designers pick a niche, Ben is a proud generalist. His work spans everything from housing developments to private homes to a quirky retail operation, Pentreth and Hall. One of his most well-known projects is not a house, but an entire village, Poundbury, a planned community in England championed by King Charles. However, Ben's work for private clients is also highly celebrated, and he's a regular on industry best of lists.

0:50I spoke with Ben about the personal tragedy that prompted him to develop a succession plan, why he takes every email inquiry seriously, and why American designers can never quite nail English style.

1:09This podcast is proudly sponsored by John Rosselli and Associates, celebrating 75 years of design excellence and artisanal inspiration. For decades, John Rosselli has been a trusted name in the design world, representing premier brands known for their craftsmanship and timeless style. With a commitment to bespoke customization and exceptional service, John Rosselli helps designers bring their creative visions to life. Visit JohnRoselli.com or step into one of their showrooms in the D &D building, the Dakota, the Washington Design Center, or the Mart to experience their legacy firsthand. This podcast is sponsored by Leloy, maker of rugs, pillows, and wall art.

1:55Leloy revealed their latest designer collaboration with Leanne Ford at High Point Market this fall. See those beautifully handcrafted rugs and pillows at their site, along with new seasons from Amber Lewis, Chris Loves Julia, and Bridget Romanek. Learn more at laloyrugs.com. That's L-O-L-O-I rugs dot com. And don't forget to follow at laloyrugs on Instagram and TikTok. And now, on with the show. Ben, we're going to get into your thoughts on English decoration and some other interesting topics that you and I have been discussing recently. But I wanted to start by talking about Poundbury, a model town of sorts that has been the longtime vision of King Charles and began when he was still the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cornwall.

2:46And talk about your long-term connection to the project that first began back in your school days. You went to the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture. Institute of Architecture, exactly. So his architectural school was his attempt in those days to challenge, in a way, the status quo of how things were normally taught. And it was an incredible education. It was also completely chaotic and sort of mad in a wonderful way. I suspect that in its way, I mean, who knows? but I wonder if it had some of the sort of febrile atmosphere that must have existed in places like the Bauhaus School. But one of our first live projects was working on the very first phase of Poundbury.

3:33It was very carefully designed as a series of streets and spaces, squares, and buildings, which had the strong characteristic that they had developed organically over time. In other words, it was a careful rendition of an old English settlement, not quite a village, not quite a town, somewhere in between the two that had developed incrementally and organically over a long period of time. What's amazing about visiting that part of Palmbury now is that it feels incredibly settled and like a place that has been there for actually far longer than it has. one of the things which I'm often struck by is how people start comparing it to a 300 or 400 year old town historic place and they sort of in comparison they say well it feels a bit um you know not quite not not quite so real or whatever the words might be and like okay but actually the only legitimate comparison that you can make this is actually not a 300 year old town it's actually a 30-year-old housing estate.

4:43It's a 1980s housing estate. And if you want to go and see what they look like, let's go down the road and we can have a look. And then talk to me about which is the most successful way forward philosophy of development. Because obviously what we're trying to do in Poundbury, we're trying to bring in a huge mix of different uses. So there's commercial spaces, there's offices, there's shops, businesses, cafes, restaurants, all of the kind of effectively the daily needs of daily life, doctor surgeries, dentists, vets, et cetera, et cetera, are all contained within the boundary of the settlement itself.

5:26And what that means is that people can walk. They don't have to get into their car. Whereas most of the rest of post-war British development, and very much so in America, most of the world has been entirely constructed around the car as the only means to get from your house to work, to shops, to schools, to leisure centres, or whatever it might be. And if one is looking at the inherent sustainability of placemaking and the robustness of placemaking in the long term, that is an incredibly powerful, complicated mix to achieve. Another underlying factor in Poundbury, which has really been incredibly successful and has been very widely adopted now as government policy within the UK, is to seamlessly mix social and affordable housing through the development, throughout each phase of the development, about 30 to 40 % of the houses are for residents who are on the affordable housing register.

6:29So that's a sort of a list held by the local authority, set by the local authority, but people who need assistance with housing. And, you know, they're generically called council housing in common parlance, social housing or council housing. And a young Prince of Wales, you know, over many decades was visiting many of these quite broken places in cities and towns across the UK. And the visual stigmatization of council housing is something which is absolutely fascinating. As soon as you enter the council estate, it's got its own slightly gloomy kind of fonts and signage everywhere. And the signage is quite bullying very often.

7:15It's like loads of signs saying, no ballgames here, or, you know, do not do this. Do not do that. Do not experience pleasure on these grounds, right? That's kind of quite extraordinary. I mean, you have that very much in America as well. We often refer to it as nimbyism here in America, right? The not in my backyard notion. Yes, I think nimbyism is something slightly different. I mean, that is like no need development in my backyard in England. My good friend who runs the King's Foundation, as it is now known, formerly the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, set up a brilliant campaign, which they ran and still continue to run a few years ago, which is called Bimbi, which is demanding beauty in my backyard.

8:00Yes, I like that. You're not saying no, but you're saying if development is to happen, we want it to be good. It's so interesting what you were saying earlier. I've spoken to so many architects who talk about this, let's use the word brainwashing, for lack of a better term, where they either want you to only focus on modernism and forget about anything you ever heard about traditional architecture, right? because we're gonna tell you what's what and here you go. And you had this incredible opportunity to hear a whole different sensibility, right? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, partly I think I'm quite lucky that I'm not actually, I'm not an architect.

8:40I'm not a qualified architect. I never went to architecture school other than my year and a half at the Prince's Institute of architecture. I read history of art and history of architecture at Edinburgh University, which gives you a completely different perspective on life because actually you suddenly realize that history is absolutely vital. It is us. We are just in a little place in history. There's that wonderful expression that history never repeats, but it rhymes, which I always love. If I remember correctly, early on in your education, you had a faculty advisor of sorts who discouraged you, if I recall, saying, oh, you're not really good at math, you're not really good at physics, maybe architecture's not for you.

9:32That's absolutely true. I put that in the introduction to my book because that was a very key person in my life. He was my careers advisor at school when I was probably 16, 17, and was very interested in going to architecture school and was firmly sat down and said, you know, this is a terrible idea. you need to have a much more physics-based and kind of maths-based kind of background if that's going to be successful. And I'm like, well, in the benefit of hindsight, that's why God created engineering.

10:09Someone else could make the building stand up. But yeah, no, I was very much steered away from architecture school. So it was a side way through thin. And there was no doubt that when the Prince of Wales began to get interested in architecture and design in the 1980s, which was his first involvement, I was really quite young. And actually, I will say that even then, his book, which is fascinating to read now, it's 30 years old, but it's still actually incredibly prescient. It's called A Vision of Britain, laying out his basic philosophy, which hasn't really changed that dramatically in the period of time.

10:54It's obviously matured and become much richer and deeper. But it's a profoundly interesting book. And that was very, very interesting to me at the time as a kind of young person beginning to get interested in design. I'm absolutely sure that even that was part of my journey. but definitely having the architectural school as a route in really made a massive, massive difference. And then I went to work in the States for five years. And then when I came back from the US, from New York, I spent another year working at the Prince's Foundation, which the architectural school had sort of morphed into a teaching charity and sort of activist charity involved in many many different aspects of the prince's interests in the built environment so I worked there for a year as an urban designer and master planner and architect architectural designer and on the back of that experience then that's when I set up on my own 20 years ago and I've spent a lot of time since on several of the big urban design projects obviously are for the duchy of Cornwall which was the prince's landowning organization, now obviously operated and managed by the new Prince of Wales, Prince William.

12:12Well, and tell me about, as you were just describing, so you went through all of that and then finally deciding to go out on your own and set up your own shop with a notion of what? What was this? The notion was pretty basic, which I do talk about in the book as well. And it was fortuitous. I had designed a little crescent of houses in Poundbury. I'd actually designed the houses when I was working with Fairfax and Salmons, with Anne and Richard, I'm sure you'll know, in New York. And so Richard and I collaborated on the buildings, but it was sort of a commission which I had brought into the office and which I was very heavily involved with, if we can put it like that.

13:02And then one half of that crescent in Poundbury, Woodlands Crescent, was built and the development slowly chugged on. And then about five years later, and I'd been back in the UK for quite a few years at that point, and was already beginning to get involved in Poundbury through the Prince's Foundation and sort of engagement with the Duchy of Cornwall in those days. the next half of the crescent came forward and they were using identical house types. And Phil Fry, who's one of the house builders said, well, we've got a small royalty fee that we need to pay for the reuse of the repeated house types.

13:41And we need to write a check for a very small number of thousands of pounds. But I mean, it was literally three or 5 ,000 pounds, something like that, I can't remember what it was, like not a lot of money, but enough that I suddenly thought, wow, I've got four months rent in the bank, you know, for the first time in my life. And it suddenly kind of gave me a light bulb moment that actually maybe this was quite a good time, which I had been thinking about in my head to strike out on my own. You know, people had been beginning to, friends or what have you, had been beginning to ask me to kind of look at little projects and things like that.

14:16But the real tipping point was that in my architectural role at the Prince's Foundation, I was involved in the oversight and the supervision of a new development, a new term development in Northamptonshire called Upton, which the foundation was involved in the master planning and the architectural delivery. And my role was to sit with the very nice house builders who were bringing forward the first phases of that development and effectively to kind of nanny them and look after them and make sure that what they were designing had sort of a degree of architectural coherence and integrity. And they were very nice people, but I will say that it was still a slightly frustrating task.

15:00And I realized then, I mean, as a slightly bullish and I guess at this stage, I was in my early to mid thirties, bouncing around like a box of frogs. I realized I wasn't the best teacher, if I can put it like that. I wasn't the most patient, not the most patient person. And as the next phase of the development was being prepared and released for the market, I was thinking, do I really want to go through the next three years of my life kind of, you know, having to collaborate with another developer and tell them what to do and what it should, you know, try and persuade them what it should look like and, you know, control and kind of thing.

15:39And I was like, oh, do I try and find a developer and actually submit our own entry. It was being, the land was being released on a design competition basis. And we entered the competition ourselves. And so that's what I opted to do, which was a very crazy move. So that was good. And so there I was, I guess I was in my early 30s. I was probably about 33 years old and I was a one-man band and I just won the design competition to design and submit planning application for 250 houses in a major need development in North Elmshenshire. Yeah, that was my first ever project, which was quite a crazy one.

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17:05Well, and what a wild start to your firm. And a firm that has since grown by leaps and bounds. And I think you told me recently it's around 40 some odd people. Yeah, we're about 40 people now. Yeah. Yeah. And help me understand the division of all of that, because here, as we've been talking about this whole time, building out these model towns and all of that. But also you're very involved in interiors projects and have a shop and all these other elements. I mean, it's quite an elaborate business, as it turns out. About one third of the office is engaged on the master planning and the town planning side, one third on architecture, one third on decoration.

17:46It's roughly that sort of split, a little more in the architectural department. So a lot of the work that we're doing is either designing new houses or restoring old houses or, you know, kind of major extensions and alterations to buildings. And if we're working on very old buildings, we love also doing the interior design because in some ways that's the really creative part of the process. And if we're working on new houses, we might be collaborating with another interior designer. And we also do quite a few interior design projects where we're working with a different architect. So it's quite a strange and unusual blend in a way.

18:31and I do have some quite strange days I will I will be honest I have some strange days in my life where in the morning I will be doing a client meeting on a private house interior decoration project and we will be sitting reviewing fabrics and wallpapers and cushion detailing and piping and you know what what fabric trims we're gonna wrap around what fringe is going around a sofa and I will leave that meeting and I will literally have to kind of empty my head of everything we've just been talking about because in the afternoon I'm going to an infrastructure meeting on a major housing development and we're looking at flood risk assessments and sort of like beneath the road drainage implications for kind of like what's happening above the development and this is a kind of a weird degree of fragmentation obviously it's a weird degree of fragmentation in the 20th century, late 20th, early 21st century.

19:33We know you're longer used to generalists. Everybody in a way now is in some sort of specialized business. You have architects who, I mean, I've been working recently with an architect who runs a very successful practice. All he does, all he has ever done his entire life is deliver sound recording studios. That's all they do. They're a big practice. Yeah. And that might include buildings, actually designing buildings, but only sound recording buildings. Or you'll have firms who are specialists in the delivery of healthcare. Or you will have firms who are specifically involved in the delivery of leisure or entertainment facilities or hotels or whatever it might be.

20:22So we've become incredibly used to this degree of sort of fragmentation and specialization, but actually in the 16th, 17th, 18th, up until the 19th century, there were very, very few distinctions between, you know, if you take an architect, you know, some of the great names of architecture and design in the 18th and the 19th century, William Kent, Robert Adam, Thomas Hope, whoever it might be, they were involved in the full gamut of design from designing pieces of furniture to designing buildings to designing cities. And they didn't make any distinction between what they were doing. They were just designing.

21:04And they were designing some of the most beautiful pieces of furniture ever made. They were designing some of the most beautiful cities ever made, some of the most beautiful buildings ever made. And so I take inspiration from that. Like I'm not worried about spreading myself too thin in a way. From a business perspective, it's maybe not the most intelligent choice these days. It can be quite confusing to people. Some people come to me with a certain idea that they think I'm an interior designer, have absolutely no idea that I've designed a building in my life. They just don't, they haven't, they, you know, they've read about me through an interiors book or magazine or whatever it might be that's their approach in other people um um in the world of the sort of um Poundbury or the developments or stuff like when they find out you know they come from meeting in our office and as you said you've got a little shop next door to us in in in London which is a a fun sideline if I can put it like that they're like oh what's that you've got a shop selling candlesticks like what's going on anyway but I enjoy it and actually it's really interesting because it also means that from the business perspective, which I know is obviously kind of really a part of your whole engagement here, there's something quite nice about not having all of your eggs in a single basket.

22:28I mean, as we've been chatting about before, England, the UK is going through a particular sort of economic cycle, economic political cycle quite different from probably the economic political cycle that America is currently about to enter where there's a general sense I would say at the moment in the UK there's just a little bit of nervousness about the confidence that very well-off people would needs in order to, you know, hover over and then press the button to kind of press ahead with construction for kind of major new private house projects. There's just a degree of nervousness in the UK at the moment about increasing taxation and kind of concepts of kind of wealth tax, which would be very new, very unprecedented for us, but it's being talked about politically a lot at the moment.

23:30I have no idea if it'll happen or not. Where I would say, and also, frankly, with bank interest rates at the levels at which they seem to be settling at the moment, availability of mortgage is much more expensive and people are moving house less. It's just that simple. And so that has definitely impacted, not in a negative way, I mean, we're not struggling, but it's definitely impacted on the number of inquiries that our studio has received over the last 18 months or two years compared to a period which felt incredibly busy before that uh we we're definitely in a state of life where we're giving you any any inquiry into the office these days we treat very seriously we give it a lot more attention anyway we're i i've i've always treated every inquiry into the office with seriousness and a sort of respect, because you never quite know how a first little kind of nascent email into the studio is going to lead.

24:35And it's something which I learned really early on is that actually, you know, sometimes it's the things which seem to be not necessarily very promising on first hint or, you know, first arrival, that actually turn out to be some of the most wonderful projects that you've ever worked on. You just don't know. But I will say that I can measure the quantity of inquiries. And so it's actually rather useful at the moment because to have different strands of the practice, I detect that we are entering a period, there is a massive movement in England now to politically to push new housing schemes through the planning process in a way that if the government achieves what it's talking about will really be quite unprecedented in my lifetime.

25:28And there's something quite intriguing for me at a business perspective at being in that space as well as in the space of kind of private housing right now, if that makes sense. It does. And there are a couple of different things I want to explore within that. And you and I were talking recently about the shop playing this wonderful marketing role in a way, right? And gives you this exposure that you might not otherwise get through all the other projects that you think it would be how people would learn of you. But as you say, you never know how people are coming to you, what they think you are when they come to you.

26:08Exactly. Yeah. But I was also struck, and this is the opportunity that's going to come out of you being on this show, you're welcome in advance, Ben, is that you are not working a lot in America, right? And that is going to change. I am going to open those doors for you in a huge way. We'll be very grateful. Well, yes. But I'm fascinated by that in part because, and you and I were having this whole discussion recently about how the British people have often viewed hiring a designer to come and help them with their home, right? And how not everyone feels comfortable with that. But also, I'm curious why the big American projects haven't been a part of your scope with all the great many things that you've been doing.

27:03I mean, partly, I think just a case. Well, partly, I would say, actually, there are many, many great American architects and interior designers. And I've always been slightly intrigued by, you know, kind of why a client would actually engage an English architect to design a building in America. But definitely open to be intrigued and understand that more. I mean, we are doing some projects at the moment in Australia and in New Zealand. And I'm less intrigued down there because actually, if you want to commission a traditional building in New Zealand, your opportunities to engage an architect who can speak that language in a coherent authentic way are very very limited indeed and I think in America obviously it's a very different it's a it's a very different field and there's a wonderful tradition in America which has been an unbroken tradition of designing the sort of buildings and interiors that we do so you know time will tell america's crying out for english interiors they love yeah it's true right i mean it's true it is true and i think that there is something that yeah i mean we are obviously very well known now in the in the field of um english interior decoration you know whatever that means i actually wrote an article um when the book was published i wrote an article for country life magazine on Englishness and design.

28:48And it's a strange thing to kind of put your finger on, but there is something fundamentally, I suppose, about an English interior, a real authentic English interior that is fundamentally slightly undesigned. And so there is something, I can't quite put my finger on it, but when, if you can think about an American client giving an American architect and an American decorator a brief to design a quote-unquote English-style house, we sort of all inherently know at a fundamental level that when that project is delivered, it will not feel in any way, shape, or form English. And how so? I mean, unpacking.

29:35Well, that's the mystery of it. It probably doesn't smell right. You know? It probably works too well. Ultimately, there's a degree to which, particularly, I think, with regard to the interior decoration, where it might feel over-designed or too comprehensively designed. Yes, that's it. And we were chatting, you know, a few days ago about that and that sense that in America, a client who is hiring an interior designer might be, to a certain extent, nervous about asking to include things that they already own. You know, there's a sort of, there's a sense somehow, when I look at, you know, beautiful, very coherent American decoration in publications, you know, such as Architectural Digest or, you know, glossy coffee table books, that there's a sort of sense of total design that I think that isn't completely how the English kind of design mentality would operate.

30:49I would certainly struggle myself with buying or specifying every last object in someone's house. And a lot of our work, we're working in some of the houses in the book. You know, we're working with people who have got fantastic collections, wonderful furniture, wonderful books, paintings, whatever it might be. You know, which maybe they've inherited or maybe they've assembled. and I'm very used to working with clients who've got quite strong ideas about what they like and what they don't like and I actually love that sort of engagement and bouncing back across you know with one another I sometimes say to people coming into our office it's a little bit like entering the tasting kitchen in a restaurant I mean we have a distinct flavor but you know I really want to know what ingredients you like and dislike before I start cooking your dinner, if that makes sense.

31:47It does. And I was so fascinated by the exercise that you described for me recently. I mean, tell me about that. With some of our projects in the early days, instead of presenting individual schemes or group scheme, and I know that these days, you know, it used to be sort of 20 years ago, it used to be that everyone spent a long time wrapping bits of fabric around foam core and cardboard and sort of kind of collating them in a sort of collage, a sort of mosaic collage, and pinning them to boards which would be presented. These days, the fashion in England, and I think probably in America, is you have trays.

32:28You know, it's the same sort of thing. It's kind of slightly less work for an intern, but nonetheless, it's sort of you're presenting on your tray. So there's something about that grid, the rectangle that, you know, I know that this is how most designers like to operate where they sort of, you know, they might, they might say that they're taking a visual or a written brief from the client, but then they're sort of basically fundamentally giving a lot of thought, a lot of focused thoughts as to kind of this color goes with this color goes this goes with this one. And, you know, this is going to be the lead fabric obviously in the I'm sorry to say it, But in the age of Instagram or social media, nothing stays new or original for more than a second these days.

33:12Like images like hurtle around. You know, I see I see an image on Instagram one week and then kind of, you know, three weeks later, I'm seeing it 50 times or whatever. It's like so weird, this deep saturation of ideas. is so even if you think you found something that is is not overused and a bit tired and a little bit shabby it's kind of like oh guess what by the time you finish that piece of upholstery you'll have seen it a thousand times but there's that sort of sense that um you know people will build three palettes for a client to choose from you know scheme a scheme b scheme scheme d and sort of take your pick.