Ben Pentreath does it all

31:31I 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.

32:28It 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.

33:09You 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 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 with this one. and you know this is going to be the lead fabric obviously in the um 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 like images like hurtle around like 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 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 as Keemsey and sort of take your pick.

34:35Do you want this one, this one, or this one? I've never actually felt very comfortable by that degree of didactic control, if that makes sense. I'm sort of not that type of person. I mean, to a certain extent, you could say, if I was being very cynical, it's actually not true. But to a certain extent, I actually genuinely don't care very much. I mean, it's sort of decoration. It is actually temporal. It should change. Interior design is not something that was carved on tablets and brought down from the mountain by Moses. Okay, but there are one or two, probably particularly American interior designers, I think we could both think of, who probably feel that they have arrived from the mountain after a brief conversation with God about what someone's living room should look like.

35:22So in contrast, what I love to do is to actually try to understand really early days of conversations about what people like and dislike. And then I'm really thinking about what the building might like or dislike as well. Absolutely crucial in the whole mix. And I quite like to start with a massive pile of ideas that I think might be ideas that might be intriguing. And I have absolutely no idea where they might end up. So I'm not being at all specific when I have a huge pile of fabrics or wallpaper, well, obviously a wallpaper, it's going to end up on a wall, but I couldn't tell you if it's going to end up in the wall of the drawing room or the bedroom or whatever.

36:03I'm not thinking that specifically at this stage. This is me laying out a list of ingredients that we might potentially use to cook with. And it's like, do you like this type of vegetable or that type of vegetable kind of thing. And what I often find is that we're then putting ideas and concepts in front of people's eyes, which they would never have dreamt of having on their own, but some of which they'll really react to positively and some of which they'll react to negatively. And I find that an awful lot of my role as an interior designer is actually teasing out from people ideas that they have had in their heads about how they would like to live, but they lack the confidence of knowing whether something is going to work or not work.

36:50And that lack of confidence left to their own devices would lead to decisions that are actually bland and anonymous and impersonal. Right. Because they're worried about failure and they'd rather risk nothing than risk failure, if you see what I mean. And so a lot of my role in that process is to actually draw out, intentionally draw out sort of contrast and, you know, different energy. And then from there, we can sort of build a scheme. It's a funny thing because it's an art. It's not a science. One of the houses which I put in my book, which is one of the projects I loved the most and had the most wonderful time working on, It's a big country house in Dorset called Chettle.

37:44When I first went there, it had been up for sale for the first time in about 400 years or 300 years. And they won the bidding process. And I was engaged and we got going. And we were beginning to kind of start all of our ideas and all of our thinking for the architectural restoration and the interiors and all the rest of it. And as that process developed, they suddenly realized, or no, not suddenly, gradually realized that they were in for something far too deep financially than they had factored in. And learning that you have made a mistake or that you're taking a project down the wrong route and having the guts to say so.

38:29but he did that and he sold the house and by a very very curious twist of fate I then got engaged about six months later to become the interior designer to the new couple who had then bought the house but they had very different taste uh and it was they were totally at the opposite ends of their kind of lives you know they were in their late 50s and um the first couple were in their 20s, you know, and if the first couple had bought the house, it would have had Tracy Emin Neons, and it would have had Shabby Chic, and it would have, you know, it would have had a completely different atmosphere. And I often tell that story to people when I'm working with them, and I'm trying to tell them that they are the most important people and the most important ingredients in the mix.

39:23It's not actually the house. Like in both instances, the house has been perfectly respected. Like the first couple would have done an impeccable job of restoring the house, no doubt about it. It would have been the same house, the same me. I was going to be like steering through their aesthetic in both situations. And both projects, you would have then been able to identify as a Ben Pentreath project, but they would have been completely different projects. And that's because the owners, the clients or patrons or whatever you want to call them, are different. They're individuals. And their taste and sense of taste is the most important thing.

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40:56you said that in in each case you'd be able to see your hand in it and yeah and i and i wonder because some designers the work is the same and you have no sense of the client and let's be let's be honest yes right yes you have no idea but what you were just describing is that you would very clearly see the two different clients in this projects, but you would also see your hand in some way. And how do you think your, as you were just describing your guidance or the role that you, how does it show up, do you think, in your work? Because there's one specific project I want to ask you about in that context.

41:37I suppose that the more projects I've worked on over the years, they begin to add up to a broad narrative where you can unpick kind of themes that run across a lot of those projects, which in a way in the book is, you know, what I was trying, actually trying to kind of understand what is it that connects the decoration of a drawing room with the design of a town square, you know, because that's also part of my kind of late mega mix of, how do I make sense of all of these things? And so these ideas of, I can't remember what any of my little mini chapter headings were at the beginning of the book, but a sense of history, a sense of character, a sense of colour, authenticity, these sorts of words.

42:25I mean, I always like to work with the history of a building or a place. There's a powerful narrative there that can take it in a million different ways. Having said that, I don't really feel very comfortable working in historicist styles of decoration. I work very comfortably in historicist styles of architecture, but in interior decoration for me, actually it is something which is more, I'm happy to paint a room any colour. I don't actually care what colour it could have been painted in 1780, if you see what I mean. It's a little bit of a cop-out in a way. At a deep philosophical level, I'm actually much more of a modernist in decoration, which is ultimately a kind of private art, leaping right back to the very first conversation, the beginning of this conversation.

43:31I love to mix contemporary furniture, antique furniture, contemporary paintings, antique wallpapers, whatever it might be. I love that conversation that is created through history by putting old things and new things and old ideas and new ideas together. And I love playing that game within the privacy of somebody's own interior. You can do whatever you like as far as I'm concerned like there are no limits at all within an urban environment I think that I like buildings to be much more background much quieter much calmer much more reticent much politer kind of like much more civic because they are going to be there for a very long time and people are going to experience them who have no choice whether they want to experience them or not.

44:22And I changed my ideas on decoration. That's the whole point of it. You can have fun. Well, exactly. And I think that there is, so I think there always is an element of fun in your work. But as you also were saying earlier, there is this lack of needing to have a certain level of polish or or it feeling like it's done to every every detail so funny enough there's an image in your in your book uh right okay so you don't remember the headers sometimes but it was the it was in the regency fireworks it was the wiltshire house right absolutely okay so on page 179 of your of your book is this extraordinary living room with this wonderfully colorful ottoman uh right between all of this furniture and there's there's amazing ceiling work that's been done in this room and there's incredible pieces of furniture and to your point it's all it's all mixed there's there's mahogany historical pieces and then the contemporary pieces anyway what what caught the eye and the fascination of magazine editors and numerous people was was a here was this photograph where on this ottoman there's some object that's actually wrapped in bubble wrap or plastic or something.

45:38And then the sofa cushion isn't all like fluffed up. It's all clearly down. And so like, people are wondering like, oh my God, how did this image even get in the book? It's not finished. Like, how did he overlook that? But clearly, it was, you saw the image, you put it in the book and the thing that was wrapped in bubble wrap or whatever on the table, you saw that. And that was obviously part of that family is living there, I'm not sure I have noticed the bubble room. Well, I mean, maybe you didn't, but it's caught the eye of many people. And to the point that I was literally, I was instructed to ask you about it.

46:19I was instructed to inquire. One of the photographs in the book is someone's kitchen and it's got a giant inflatable shark wedged in underneath the kitchen island. And I've had a few questions about that one as well. So my theory when I'm taking photographs of houses, I'm going to look up the bubble wrap. Yeah. Where is that? Look it up. Look it up. But it is funny because. Oh, yeah, there it is. Exactly. Yeah. That'll be. Yeah, I didn't. Yes, that was all just part of the board games and the kind of, you know, the boxes and all the rest of it. So I have a theory which is very carried out. When I'm taking photographs of interiors, I don't like to do masses and masses of kind of moving things around and editing.

47:16Now that you point out the bubble wrap, I might have made the effort to take that off. I think I took that photograph towards the end of the day. It shows you the attention that people are paying to your work, Ben. Yeah, and it also demonstrates my rigorous attention to detail. But actually, one of the fascinating things for me about producing the book was the process of actually taking all the photographs, which was a massive learning exercise. I realised quite early on that I was going to struggle to engage a professional photographer to help on the projects because they were so diverse in their character and in their geography that, you know, finding a photographer to take photographs of interiors is one thing.

48:07finding a photographer to take photographs of modern architectural environments is another thing um finding somebody who's comfortable in both in both worlds is um really quite tough and i i struggled to find somebody who understood the capturing the atmosphere of some of the town building projects at the same time as houses and interiors and i realized that basically i was going to have to, I was going to have to kind of learn how to do a lot of this myself. And so as I went through the projects, I realized that, you know, quite a few of our houses over the years have been photographed professionally by, you know, very, you know, great interiors photographers.

49:00But what What I realized is there's a sort of slightly bombastic dogmatic kind of quality to a lot of interiors photography where they will bring their camera in, place the tripod exactly where they want it, and then spend the next kind of two hours moving everything around in homage to the position of the tripod, which the photographer set at the beginning. I have been on shoots with multiple assistants where literally hours get spent where, you know, sofas are moved an inch or two further back. You know, everything is positioned and composed for this kind of. And it's it's almost like the camera is like, I don't know, Louis XIV, you know, the sun king or something like and everything is kind of being positioned to kind of worship the camera position.

49:46and if you're on your own in a house taking photographs of an interior you actually just don't have the luxury of all of that kind of pushing and pulling and poking it's incredibly exhausting incredibly slow and and actually the really weird thing is at the end of the day you create an energy and a photograph is a very weird representation of reality. You know, you really, really learn as you take a photograph how incredibly sophisticated human sight is by comparison to a camera. Just the fact that we have two lenses, you know, the fact that we have, you know, our two eyes, which bring in a huge amount of information.

50:39The fact that you can simultaneously see things in the near foreground and in the far distance, and there's no focal issues. The fact that I can look out of the window and see kind of buildings in the distance, but my kind of, I can also read the tone of the room inside and so on and so forth. Like the human brain and I are incredibly sophisticated at deep processing information in a way that camera is incredibly crude at doing so. But one of the things which I learned is that therefore, what you're trying to do as the photographer is to capture the atmosphere of what a place is like, really. And the best thing you can do is to gently kind of let your camera move around.

51:22and I came up with a basic rule that I didn't touch anything. If it was okay, I photograph it as I found it. In retrospect, I probably should have taken the bubble wrap off, but then the bubble wrap on that ottoman is part of the informality of that house in a sense. It's sort of, you know, there are some of the projects which are more inherently composed, but in very, very few of the projects in the book was I pimping anything in virtually none of them that I can think of was bringing things in but there's definitely a narrative I mean I know the order in which I photographed the buildings and the houses and the places and as time went on I became softer and softer and more and more reticent in my approach less didactic less bombastic and and actually got a lot more nimble at capturing the place as well.

52:16I could spend much less time and actually be able to impart much more information because it's all to do with realizing that the camera is not the powerful thing. The camera is actually the weak thing in the mix. Well, I wonder, and you've talked about this a bit, the process of putting this book together And you've joked about the many delays involved in putting the book together, but also the sort of extraordinary undertaking required, but how one looks back on their work and the decisions that you made at various projects, right, over the years. Yeah. see how your work evolved. I wonder what you walked away understanding better or thinking about with both your work and career.

53:13You know, I'm at a sort of an interesting time. I've been working for 20 years. If I was a certain type of person, I could say, well, I've got another 20 years or 30 years to work. Yes. Are you that person? No, I'm not. I'm actually genuinely not because I I have quite a strong feeling that an awful lot of architects like to think of themselves, that the older they get, the better they get. And I'm not sure that's true. I think that there is a moment at which one's interest and sort of like joie de vivre or sense of excitement at life and the challenges of life can begin to diminish a little bit.

53:59And I think that there's a sense at which, there's just sometimes a sense at which it's good to change the pace of your life and not pretend that you need to kind of like be this very controlling, dominating person forever and ever and ever and ever. And so I definitely do not feel that I want to carry on at the same sort of pace as I have been at the moment, you know, for as long as I have been so far. I really do feel that quite strongly. I think looking back at things teaches you what's important, what's less important. And I mean, it's fascinating being up here in Orkney and beginning to think about the house up here and how we're going to do things slowly.

54:45And, you know, unlike when I was first decorating the parsonage down in Dorset, where, you know, that was very much that was sort of 18, 17 years ago, the start of my career. You know, we're now tackling a house, I won't say at the end of my career at all, but, you know, kind of in the second half, if I can put it like that. and um i'm definitely feeling our approach up here will be i think a lot gentler a lot quieter a lot more sort of like i mean i'm increasingly less worried about things being designed if that makes sense particularly when it comes to interiors yeah it's um this this particular house has got a very very quiet um reticent energy which i'm you know this it was interesting how the parsonage wanted color and pattern and in a way this house doesn't and maybe that's just me going through a slightly different phase of life i'm not sure well i mean it it's interesting in part because we we've been talking recently about succession my my colleague fred wrote wrote an extensive piece about talking to different firms david david kleinberg who tried to figure out a succession plan for his firm and it didn't really work out as he had hoped or intended.

56:02And it's very challenging for many designers to step away or architects to construct a plan that will allow someone else to take over in the future. And I don't know. I mean, it feels like, and I just had the pleasure of celebrating your birthday with you in New York. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. I was thinking about your age and sort of where you are in your career. And I wondered, and it sounds like you are, if you were thinking about, okay, you know, it doesn't have to be this intense. Exactly. I began to think about this quite intensely a few years ago. And I've talked about it a little bit with people.

56:47But it was a definite sad moment in my life where my mum had an unexpected heart attack and died. And my father needed a lot of care and attention and love, which my brothers and I gave him. I mean, obviously, there was the sort of, to a certain extent, there was just the shock of mum dying. and then sadly but rather beautifully in its way like literally within a matter of weeks my dad died um you know really not very long after my mother had died after 50 plus years of being married and being together in a way he just couldn't really cope without her uh it was a wonderful thing but then um I had another whole period uh where I was kind of um needing to at that moment look after myself as it were um and that was now about five years ago and there was a really crazy moment um for me on a sort of on a professional um journey uh which that those two events nearly almost simultaneously made me reflect on in a way that i think if if it hadn't happened in quite the way.

58:06It might have taken me a little bit longer to realize the reality of life. And at that time, without a shadow of a doubt, almost every single decision in the office in some way, shape or form was coming back and landing on my desk. It was just how things were. And suddenly, at a minute's notice, my mum died on a Sunday night at nine o 'clock in the evening. and um on the monday morning uh instead of me being in london as planned you know running the whole show and being center of the whole thing you know what i wasn't there and i wasn't there for weeks and weeks and weeks i was intermittently there um but really hardly at all and obviously uh i was already wrapped in a lot of love and support from the studio and from clients and you know, all sorts of stuff.

59:01But what was absolutely fascinating is that during that entire process, absolutely nothing missed a beat. And I don't mind admitting that it was at the end of that process as I was coming back into the office and reconnecting and realizing that and having been set up in a system where, as I said, every single decision was, it was in some degree or another landing on my desk, which made me a very crucial spoke to the wheel, a very important person, I suddenly realized that I was utterly dispensable at a certain point. And I also realized another thing that I had grown the practice to a scale where it also was beginning to develop a life of its own and attract talent of its own and create systems of its own.

59:53It had its own culture. And I think it really put that starkly into focus for me in a rather beautiful way. I was like, okay, this is really good. And so I actually asked my accountants to just prepare a document for me to discuss different ways of what happens next type of thing. Because one of the things I was actually certain of is that the earlier I thought about it, the calmer and more processed and more successful any succession would be. And in there was a very interesting setup by the government quite a few years ago now in England called an Employee Ownership Trust, which allows somebody like me in any sphere of life who's created their own company to divest ownership from the individual into the company as a whole.

1:00:50And the reason the government is really wanting to support that is because there is a strong amount of evidence that businesses where employees have a sense of ownership of the company while they work within the company actually prosper better than those which don't. And so to cut a very long story short, that was the method that I then set up. And I guess about two or three years later, two or three years ago, I took the company down that route. So it's actually now owned by a trust. I'm obviously a founder trustee, but there will be a moment where I pull away from the trust. And there will be a moment where the company has effectively, over a very long period of time, paid me back for the value which was set by the HMRC when we did the company valuation.

1:01:39At which point, I will actually no longer have any, as it were, financial interest in the company. I'm just a normal employee. I'm currently just a normal employee now, just like everyone else. And I think of all of the different metrics that I could look at to create a place where effectively a collaborative approach can outlive my departure. That was the one that I could see that would be most robust for the long term, engender kind of least rivalries or jealousies or those sorts of issues that can bubble up in firms with succession. and I think in order for that to succeed actually that there must be a moment which we still need to work out exactly when that is but there must be a moment at which I stand back and begin to stand back and sort of make it clear that I'm beginning to stand back and so that process is just very very gently underway and so that's quite exciting for me to think that we've sort of got to a point where the trust is now set up and will exist there is a definite sense of which I'm highly conscious that there will be, there really will be a moment sooner than I care to imagine, where I know that the firm, the practice, the studio, the philosophy, the kind of, you know, the nugget of what we are about will be led more successfully, kind of not by me.

1:03:08I think will actually be one of the best gifts that I can give to the longevity of the practice, because it's all about letting the next generation, who I'm carefully focused on at the moment, kind of have the time and the space, crucially, to kind of prosper and do what they need to do. One of the first updates, which I think will be happening later this year, is that the name of the studio is just ever so slightly going to shift. I wonder. And it'll be goodbye to Ben. and hello to Pentree Studio. But I think that that is, it is, again, it's all part of, I mean, we had a whole discussion within the office about kind of just losing that name entirely.

1:03:56Sure. It's no skin off my nose. You know, do we call ourselves traditional architectural design? And then everyone thought on balance, you know, when I was chatting to all of the directors, I was like, they were like, that seems like kind of quite an easy way to just put your reputation through the treasure in a way. Like, what's the point in that? Like, we've built a strong reputation and that's nice to continue to reference. But I think that very much increasingly I will be trying to create a world in which less of the personality is about me. Well, but you've built this tremendous brand equity.

1:04:37And so there is a lot behind Pentreith. there is a lot of meaning and value behind it and so i i think that's a i think that's a very clever way to to continue and and to work towards so this is this is this is big and i'm and i'm excited about this for you and as i say we're gonna we're gonna check back in with you and and see how it's progressive yes ben it's it it's been an immense pleasure speaking with you and i and i thank you so much for the time i've absolutely loved that apart from that plastic bag

1:05:09Thanks for listening. If you'd like to keep up with the latest design industry news, visit us online at businessofhome.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, browse job listings, and join our BOH Insider community for access to online workshops, a free print subscription, and much more. If you have a note for the podcast, drop us a line at podcast at businessofhome.com. If you're enjoying these conversations, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps others to discover the show. This show was produced by Fred Nikolaus and edited by Michael Castaneda. I'm Dan of Scully. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you next week.