One minute Ben Pentreath will be deep in discussion on the master plan for a huge residential project, deciding street networks, water sources, lighting and tree planting, the next he will be deciding the piping for the edge of a cushion.
As the founder of one of London’s leading design studios, the architectural designer’s oeuvre is admittedly somewhat eclectic. There are the houses he has built for the Duchy of Cornwall in Poundbury, but also his colour-punch interiors that garner legions of likes on Instagram.
And while his work oscillates wildly in scope, what unifies his housing estates, with the private garden pavilions, the love of ottomans covered in art books and chintz-covered French dressers, is his dedication to the concept of beauty.
His is a vision of Englishness that plays with the language of Robert Adam, Sir Christopher Wren and William Morris. “I definitely define myself as a traditional architect or designer, because I’m deeply interested in old buildings and I’m definitely not afraid of copying them. I think originality is extremely overrated.”
At the same time there is something deeply contemporary about Pentreath. While his practice is informed by his studies of history, (Pentreath studied art history at the University of Edinburgh before attending the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture) he doesn’t let it hold him hostage. “There’s this whole arcadia narrative of how life was better in history which I totally don’t subscribe to,” he says.
We are in the Georgian Bloomsbury flat he shares with his husband, the florist Charlie McCormick, as well as their corgis, Sibyl and Enid and their black lab, Mavis. Their other home is in Dorset, close to where Pentreath grew up, and to Poundbury. These and other Pentreath projects feature in his new book An English Vision, published by Rizzoli.
However it is his experience of designing and building residential housing estates that I am keen to talk about. Days before we were due to meet, Sir Keir Starmer swept into power with a promise to build 1.5m new homes in five years.
After decades of stultifying Nimbyism, there is trepidation on the edges of towns about what the loosening of the greenbelt might unleash.
Building on the greenbelt
Pentreath is nervous too. Not because he is inherently horrified by the concept of rapid house building and greenbelt expansion, but a lack of faith in our ability today to build en masse. He can pull out plenty of positive examples from history of what building on the greenbelt can look like.
Cities like Edinburgh and its New Town, went through massive expansion throughout the 18th and 19th century and are now very desirable. There is Bath of course, and Cheltenham, which grew by 10,000 houses every 10 years. “The population was just booming because of the spa. And now all of it is Grade-II listed and it’s a highly valued piece of urbanism.”
Liverpool, he cites as another example of how we have in the past built with great gusto. “The population went up from something like 20,000 people in the 1780s to a million people by the year 1900. And I wont say it’s all perfect but that’s an astonishing expansion.”
Neither does he find anything exceptional in today’s chronic Nimbyism. A James Gillray from the 18th century satirised the building of Islington, calling it London Marches Out of Town. “There are armies of terraced houses marching over the countryside, with haystacks and animals running away.” Of course now it is considered an example of urbanism at its most beautiful. “It has stood the test of time as a great place to live.”
That rapid urban advancement was all down to extreme confidence he says. Not all of it is always well-placed: “There’s no doubt that by the late 19th century the huge Victorian expansion of cities with no services was really brutal.” The garden cities, such as Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City he notes, were a response to the horror of the late Victorian development, “Which were real slums.”
Crisis of confidence in building
By contrast today we’re at a low ebb of confidence. “We have completely lost our sense of self-belief. It’s astonishing,” says Pentreath
The last time it was really anywhere to be seen in great amounts was during the 1960s when architects had bold dreams about social housing. That many were costly to maintain and have already been demolished hasn’t helped our building malaise. Rather than point the finger at any one architectural style, Pentreath thinks that the problem is late stage capitalism.
The vast majority of houses in the UK are built by a clutch of housing developers. “They are shareholder driven so their job is to build as many houses as quickly and cheaply as possible and actually they’re quite good at it.” The “It” here is delivering to the tight margins required. Not the houses themselves. Most says Pentreath “Aren’t nice, they’re not well-designed. But it’s normal. It’s not weird.”
He compares the situation as a building nation to our egg buying habits. “Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver might say. ‘Let’s eat free range organic eggs, wouldn’t that be nice for chickens if they had a good life?’, but the last time I looked, I think 5 per cent of eggs in Britain are free range and 1 per cent are organic. So that’s over 90 per cent that are not. And it’s a bit like that with housing. We’ve got ourselves into such a hyperglobalist and industrialised housing industry that it’s quite hard to interrupt that.”
Why older isn’t always better
As a result we are in the grip of a misguided reverence for anything that is old. We idealise Georgian and Victorian buildings.
“For understandable reasons,” says Pentreath. “Unfortunately we’re surrounded by too much in the world that has been badly designed, therefore we get into a headspace where something old must be good and something new must be bad, which isn’t a bad position if you’re just observing the world as it is today, but it’s completely illogical.”
He recalls the uproar that ensued while working on a dense urban site in Cambridgeshire; a Victorian villa, expanded unsympathetically into a hotel in the 1960s and now being remodelled into a state of the art dementia centre.
When the building proved unviable in its current state, it was decided it should be demolished and replaced. Cue a campaign to save it from locals.
“It wasn’t a rare or special building. It wasn’t in a conservation area. It was a completely bog-standard 1880s villa of which there were hundreds of thousands, built at the time with no regard for localism or materials,” says Pentreath.
He laughs at the idea of the Victorian builders hearing the arguments to save it. “They would just think we were absolutely mental. They thought nothing about destroying the thing they wanted in the name of progress, because they had a sense of self-belief and purpose.” Still he had sympathy with the “lovely” local councillor who had taken up the building’s cause.
“Most people’s sense is that if something old is going to be demolished these days we are right to protest it, because we all in our hearts know that 99 per cent of the time it’s going to be replaced with something that is worse. “This is where Nimbyism comes from. We know it will probably be bad if a new development happens on the edge of your village.”
Not-so Nimby anymore
When Pentreath started working on Poundbury 20 years ago he recalls there was a real sense of “we don’t want any new houses”.
“Now, I really feel that this mood has changed. And partly, it’s because 20 years ago, the protestors were invariably in their fifties and sixties and had often fairly recently moved into an area. Now those same people are in their late seventies or eighties and the interesting thing is none of their grandchildren can afford to buy a house.”
Now people are more inclined to accept new houses, “but they want them to be beautiful, sustainable, and have proper services and infrastructure. Surely not too much to ask – but one wonders if it will be delivered”.
Homes fit for a king
Poundbury is arguably the most famous new development in the UK. It has taken 30 years to build 2,500 houses, of which 1,500 Pentreath has been involved with and it is nearly finished. “We could probably have gone faster,” he says. Given the length of time it has taken to really craft the town though, it doesn’t bode well for 1.5m houses needed. Indeed, we’ve only built about 5.5m houses in the UK since 1995 when Poundbury started, and 9.6m in the last 54 years.
Back then it was considered commercial suicide by the Duchy. “It was in a marginal part of the world with not very high house prices. And if the King hadn’t stuck at it, getting a lot of flack, not just from the architectural community about how pastiche it was, but also from the development lobby, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Today it has created a model that other landowners have sought to emulate. Many of Pentreath’s clients are landowners taking a long term interest in the developments he is working on. Welborne Garden Village in Hampshire is on Southwark Estate land. He is working with the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire and in Aberdeenshire with the Earl of Moray at Tornagrain. Earlier this year Pentreath submitted plans for a new 2,500-home neighbourhood in Faversham, Kent, for the Duchy of Cornwall.
“I love working on people’s private houses and interiors, it’s so exciting and you get to commission amazing craftsmen. The level of detail we can control in a private house means it is a very creative act. But the thing that really excites me is the bigger picture.”
It isn’t easy. The margins are always tight, even in the best areas; the cost per sq ft to build a house with what you can sell it for is subtracted. “In that margin is everything that is nice; landscaping, architectural embellishment, better or worse materials, community infrastructure.”
Where he is working with the Welbeck Estate in Nottinghamshire it is a tough part of the world to achieve good design because the house prices are low. “It’s a booming part of the world but house prices are still very suppressed compared to southern England; it’s not in the London orbit.”
Similarly in Aberdeenshire. Tornagrain holds a special place in his heart because unlike Poundbury, which his friend Léon Krier had created the master plan for, it is all his own. He is immensely proud of the 400 houses he has so far built. “It’s already got a very strong sense of community.”
And yet after 15 years (18 if you include planning) the estate has not reached the break even point. “Every year they’re spending millions of pounds on sewage infrastructure, landscape improvement or roads, because they’re doing it properly.”
Tornagrain is a 50-year project and is expected at some point in the next 10 years to start to become profitable. It’s a business model that Pentreath points out that if you’re a farmer selling a field to buy a house in Spain, then it is no good for you.
“What we’ve achieved there is as a result of a deeply patient landowner who is prepared to wait for profit. If you had a shareholder business it wouldn’t work.”
Pentreath would love to see other landowners following suit; Oxbridge colleges, the Church of England and pension companies that do not need quick returns. “Lots of people are trying to tap into that world because it could change things.”
Pastiche, moi?
A common criticism of such landed developments, and indeed of Pentreath’s own work though, is that they are pastiche. He is unperturbed by the P word: “Everyone compares it to a 300-year-old town and says it’s pastiche. All it is a 25-year-old housing estate but given love and attention.
“There’s also a whole style of quasi-contemporary architecture, which is equally pastiche in that it feels a bit fake. It’s not done with integrity. That’s basically what we mean by pastiche.”
Pentreath has given a nickname to the vogue for modern buildings built out of black and white plastic, with big glazing windows: “Kiwiana”. In New Zealand where his husband is from it is everywhere. “It’s the most disgusting development. You just know loads of poor birds are going to die smashing into the windows.”
Modernism is just another historical style now. “It copies itself as well.”
While he is sanguine about being called pastiche, he does find it frustrating when his developments are accused of being exclusive and expensive.
“We’re struggling to try and maintain architectural standards and in order to do that we have to get a small increase in the value of the house compared to if it was just built by a bog-standard Scottish housing developer. We have to be able to achieve a small premium, and then the criticism becomes that it’s a bit expensive and lah-di-dah,” Pentreath does a cartoon shriek of frustration. The pay off is that over time the houses retain their value, and even go up (new build houses on the other hand have been known to lose value by over 7 per cent). As well as being pleasant places to live.
“It’s a really tough nut to crack. You can’t please all the people all of the time,” sighs Pentreath. It comes down to whether we want more organic eggs or not…
1.5m homes in five years is unrealistic
“We’d have to build Poundbury every two days for the next 5 years,” exclaims Pentreath.
So is it inevitable that we are going to end up with more boring or bad housing? “Yes,” he pauses. “Both. If the aim is to build 1.5m houses in the next five years, which is an awful lot of houses every single day, inevitably you are going to be working with those large volume house builders and their system is so fixed that it is what it is: “And you better just eat it up. You can’t worry about it.”
That they will be poorly built, isn’t necessarily the problem. Pull back the plaster on a lot of sought-after Georgian terraces and you’d be appalled at the rickety, rubbley nature of them.
It’s more that large housebuilders haven’t hit upon an aesthetic pleasing formula. Pentreath has tried collaborating with them in the past, but it can be hard to tamper with their mass production process.
“Normally when a planning officer or a design consultant is trying to intervene it is far too late. They are a very typological business,” he says.
However, if some small tweaks were made to their whole design process from the very start, he believes we could start to rediscover some of that confidence we had in the 18th and 19th century.
“If you take something that’s a bit ugly and you build a lot of it, you create something quite ugly. But if you take something that’s quite beautiful and you build a lot of it, it creates something that is actually very beautiful. That is the great lesson of the 18th-century city expansion.”
Scale and proportion would be his starting point. “There’s a level where we also need variety and things that are a little bit handmade. It’s really hard to achieve, but it’s not completely impossible. The car industry is very good at customisation and individuality.”
What one single thing could we do to make everything look nicer? “I’d make everybody paint their houses white. Even if they’re not very nice houses if you’re in an environment where they’re all white… that’s such a stupid thing to say, but it is actually weirdly fascinating how it works.”
Pentreath can see how we might yet create beauty in the greenbelt. “But you’d be turning around a big oil tanker and it might take 15 years to turn around. We don’t have that time.”
Of what is to come he says: “Let’s hope we won’t regret it in 30 years. It will be partly good and partly bad. And for better or worse we do need the houses.”
An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today by Ben Pentreath is published by Rizzoli priced at £45.00 on 24thSeptember.
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