Ep. 485: Ben Pentreath's New Book

How to Decorate

British architect and interior designer Ben Pentreath discusses his new book, 'A Year at the Parsonage,' co-authored with his husband Charli

Key takeaways

• Ben Pentreath's book 'A Year at the Parsonage' serves as a visual diary of 15 years in a Dorset estate.
• Pentreath advocates for an evolutionary approach to decorating rather than fixing styles in stone.

Main topics

• A Year at the Parsonage book launch
• Evolution of interior design and color

Notable quotes

It's not the physical place. It's the fact that we're in that place and all of our objects, all of which carry sort of meaning and memories.

Conclusion

A sentimental yet practical episode that encourages listeners to embra

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home. I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn, and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head up the creative team. We're your hosts. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. Speaker 2 (0:22) Plus, we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at ballarddesigns.net. Now, on with the show. Speaker 3 (0:33) Ben Pintreith is a British architect and interior designer based in London, where he runs his practice and his beloved shop, Pintreith & Hall. He's been on the How to Decorate podcast before. We had a two-hour episode. Today, we're thrilled to talk about his new book, A Year at the Parsonage, co-written with his husband, Charlie McCormick, the story of the 15 years they spent in an 1820 Regency house in Dorset, and which you featured a little bit of in the first book. And has been on your Instagram. You've talked about it on your blog. So your fans know the space well. Speaker 1 (1:08) It was not, yeah, exactly. Not an unknown house. Yeah, I'll say that. Speaker 3 (1:12) Yes, but now it's in this gorgeous new book, A Year at the Parsonage, and it documents the space, the history, your history there, the gorgeous garden that evolved so much over the time you were there. Yeah. Liz, I think you said this when we were chatting about it, but... It is such a sweet and sentimental story. Yeah. And I wasn't necessarily expecting that. So I loved getting into Speaker 1 (1:42) sort Speaker 3 (1:43) of the emotional and the, you know, the realness of your life there. Speaker 1 (1:49) Well, I think in a strangeness way, houses are quite emotional. And what I realize is that it's, you know, that... that we sort of weave our whole lives through houses and gardens and places. And, but what I realized is that, um, Speaker 1 (2:08) In a way, it's not the physical place. It's the fact that we're in that place and all of our objects, all of which carry sort of meaning and memories and ideas and friendships and all the rest of it. It's those things in aggregate and your time in a place and your connections and memories of people being there and all of that. That's the thing which makes a house an emotional. an emotional space compared to rooms which are much more neutral and which don't have that sense of belonging where you're sort of settling in. And then the very weird thing is that when you leave and move on as we did, and that's obviously a whole part of the book is the story of how we arrived and how I first arrived there and then how the house and my life shifted when I met Charlie and then he moved in. with me and then the story of how we left and moved up to Scotland where we are now. You realize that it's those, you leave a building and those memories come with you. They're not encapsulated in the rooms, they're encapsulated in the things which were with you when you were there, I think. Speaker 2 (3:26) Yeah. There's also an incredible recognition of knowing that you are in a special place on earth, you know, like that is very, very lovely and charming. Speaker 1 (3:38) It was an amazing, I mean, it is an amazing place there. Um, I, I mean, when I, when I first moved there, um, which was about, oh gosh, 15 or 16 years ago now, 17 years ago now, I had this kind of long, distant memory because, as I explained in the book, when I was really young, a really good friend of mine, his parents had rented the house in the 1970s, and I spent a lot of time there as a child with my best friend, also called Ben. And so... I had this sort of distant memory of the whole house and the whole landscape. And there's something interesting about that. It's actually quite unusual to get to live in a house which you knew really well as a child. It sort of doesn't happen very often. But it was an amazing place. The whole village is stunningly beautiful. And it's in a very beautiful part of the English countryside. It's West Dorset, which is... a really special, unspoiled part of England. But even within the whole context of that beautiful Dorset countryside, and we were very close to the coast, so we could pootle down the valley and go swimming in the sea and all of those sorts of things, which are really lovely and attract so many people to that part of the world, either as visitors or it's a lovely, just a wonderful place to live. There was something like... even more magical about the village of Little Bridie where we lived because it had this really unusual sense of being a little bit like a place which was completely lost in time. These sorts of places are increasingly rare in England. Speaker 1 (5:30) Very rare in America, I would say. But it was an old agricultural estate. So it's one of those villages which, I mean, it's a tiny place. It had about 40 houses in it. There was the big house, which was our landlord's house. Really quite a fine building, an important architectural building filled with amazing treasures and, you know, contents. And the family who built that, they were called Williams. And they moved down to Dorset in the 18th century and built this house. And then around it, they created this incredible village with, there was a beautiful little church, which they extended and restored. And then they built our house and then terraces of little cottages, mainly thatched, the cottages. And they... The whole thing was designed as a sort of aesthetic creation. They actually hired very, very good architects in the early 19th century to build all of these buildings, and they created a lake, an artificial lake. with waterfalls and little bridges over it. And then the stream ran through the village and went through. There was a beautiful walled garden, like a really traditional Victorian walled garden where the stream kind of runs straight through the bottom of the walled garden. And it all sits in this incredible valley. And then the family had been there for basically about 300 years, just under. In this sort of benign ownership of the whole place, very gentle, nothing really changed. Our landlord, who is a really good friend of ours and just the most amazing person, you know, he had a sort of wonderful sense that he just didn't really want anything to change in the village. Speaker 1 (7:23) As time went on and as kind of modernity sort of encircled the whole place, it increasingly felt like this place which you just couldn't find anything like it today. And when I first got there, you know, there was just this amazing feeling of living in a settlement that really felt like it. It wasn't stuck in time because it was still, you know, we had a lot of fun. There was an amazing sense of community. Everybody in the village kind of knew each other. We had crazy little social club where we had crazy nights and, you know, you name it. Like it wasn't boring in any way, but it was this very rare kind of unusual place to live. It was just incredible. Speaker 2 (8:10) So you moved into... into the home in 2009. What was your approach to living in the space? I mean, there are so many great things that I think kind of came with the house. There was a banner from the coronation of King Edward that God saved the king. No, that didn't come with the house. Speaker 1 (8:29) That's my Speaker 2 (8:32) misunderstanding. Speaker 1 (8:33) Not at all. That came with Charlie. Speaker 2 (8:36) Oh, that came with Charlie. Speaker 1 (8:37) Yeah. Yeah. No, so I moved in. When I moved in, it was actually in quite an unloved situation. The previous people had left a little while before and they had sort of left in quite a hurry. And then it lived through a winter at least, quite a long time without anyone being there. And you know what old houses are like. If they don't have people living there and the heat on and the windows open and all of that sort of stuff. they can quite quickly go a bit crazy. And that had definitely happened here. It was, yeah, black mold on the walls and sort of all very run down and tired and it needed some love. But actually, in the weird way, that is, for me, it was the best thing ever because there's not, you know, that's easy in a way to fix. You just need to do some building work and you need to get the thing sorted and you need to do some painting of the walls and what have you to your decoration. But then it's, but then it's all done. And if you can find a house, um, in that setup, then if, and obviously we'll talk a bit about maybe renting houses rather than owning houses, because that was part of the whole weirdness. Um, but whereas if you're renting a house where the landlord has just done it all up, you know, ready for, you know. tenants, then there's nothing worse than that because they might have put in the most horrible bathrooms or the most horrible kitchen, which they then would be extremely unhappy if you tried to change it. So in a weird sort of way, my advice, if you want to be a happy tenant, is always trying to find a house before anybody's spent any money on it, because normally it would be pretty horrible if they have. So anyway, so we did all of that together. I did it in collaboration with the landlord. And then I moved in in those early days and it was Yeah, there was actually not very much in the house at all. There was nothing. And everything which was nice, we put in. We restored the fireplaces and things like that, which had been taken out. But what it did have was just this perfect, it had a really good energy. And it was a house which had... It had fallen out of love and it needed love. But it was one of those sort of buildings that as soon as you started loving it, it really gave the love back, if that makes sense. Because it was such a special place. Small, you know, there's nothing fancy about it at all. It was quite humble, really, in its proportions and scale. But there was something about the way that it sits within the landscape that I was just describing, this sort of valley. And it was in this perfect position overlooking the sort of trees and woodland beyond. And the ground fell quite steeply from the house. It was a really slopey garden, crazy garden on a really steep slope down to the bottom of the valley. But then on the other side were these beautiful woods. And there was something about being in that position. It almost felt like you were floating over the woodland. And it was that position. in the heart of the village with a little church right next door. It was just an incredible place to be. But when I first moved in, you know, I didn't have a grand plan for decoration. I'm terrible at that, as you've probably read in the book. It sort of, it all evolves very slowly. There was no particular, I also didn't have any. I didn't have any money to do formal decorating, if you know what I mean. It was the cheapest finishes I could afford, which was seagrass on the carpets, cotton ticking on the curtains. And then over the years, we just started filling it up with stuff. And that's my basic decoration mantra. I Speaker 3 (12:24) love that. Well, okay. There is more. I did want to go back to... to the beginning a little bit, like when you first rented the house, that you were working in London and still your business is built there. My studio is Speaker 1 (12:41) still in London. So that was really in the early days. In those days, the office was actually tiny. Now it's, gosh, it's almost 50 people. So it's a whole, it's been a really interesting evolution to watch that happen over the last 20 years. Speaker 1 (12:58) But yeah, so my main day-to-day job was in London. And then I was using it as effectively as a weekend house. Speaker 3 (13:06) So when you talk about in the book how when you first moved in and you did the light renovations and you were starting to fill it up, you chose some mostly neutral wall colors. But then, of course, the rooms that we're seeing in the book, there's a... bright yellow in the kitchen and there's an olive brown. So talk to me about how maybe as you were there, kind of how you're spending more time there, how Speaker 1 (13:35) you're approaching it. Well, exactly. And actually, so when I first moved in there, I think I'm sure a lot of your listeners will relate to this, that, you know, you're suddenly, you know, you've taken on a new house, you're trying to get it sorted, you're trying to move in, you know, I was renting another tiny little house, a flat. in a house down the road. And I'd sort of fixed the end date for that. So it was time to move across. And I didn't have masses of time to think about all the decisions. And I think that often people can find making lots of choices all in one go quite overwhelming. Speaker 1 (14:15) My first instance, my first instinct for the house was to say that it just wanted a very gentle treatment. You know, the kitchen had white walls, the dining room I painted very pale grey, the drawing room I painted a slightly different shade of pale grey. It wasn't that I was in a kind of pale grey phase. You know, there's that whole mean expression, isn't there? Greyish. Everyone is very rude about pale grey or white. I actually quite like it. pale gray interiors. It's sort of, I've ironically become incredibly well known as a decorator who does lots of color. Um, but that's sometimes just kind of accidents. And then you do, you do a colorful room for somebody and then everybody wants the colorful room. And then you're known as a decorator. He does lots of color. You, I'm talking to you here from Scotland, your leader, your, um, listeners won't be able to see this because, um, you know, it's, it's just recorded. It's not going to be on screen, but you go, you can see me. I'm in a room with, which has got white walls. It's lovely. Um, but anyway, that's how I started. And, um, the rooms upstairs were just very simple, um, soft colors. And then as I spent more time there, and I think this is a really nice thing to do. Uh, you can live with stronger colors, um, but, uh, they take time to be. for you to be certain that it's the right decision, if that makes sense. I mean, I went through my first winter and definitely some of these rooms felt a little bit cold and chilly. And I anticipated that over time that it would shift and evolve a bit. There are some early photographs from those early days. When I wrote my first book, I think it was, the house was photographed for a magazine. when that book came out. And so I've still got those images. On balance, we decided not to include them in the narrative of this story. It almost feels like there's another book to come at some stage about how to decorate and that sense that things need to evolve. The whole point about interior decoration for me is that it's really not something that should be sort of fixed in stone and then never touched. actually is all about it's quite it's a bit like fashion or clothes you know you have your favorite things and they last for a long time and then you have things that don't last for very long but you know in Speaker 2 (16:40) a Speaker 1 (16:40) in a way that now you know we're all told oh that's terrible like you know fashion's got to be really you know you've got to buy for permanence and all the rest of it You kind of do, but we're humans. Like it's quite fun just having change. Like it's good for your life to change your energy. So I started, I started as I say, with this quite neutral approach. And then over the first or second winter, I was like, began to evolve, living with colors, painted on the walls and patches. And then went through, yeah, I had some. great hits that I definitely had some misses as well. The dining room. In the phase where I painted the drawing room into the pink color, which became quite a famous color. I mean, it's a very well, it's a very good selling color from a London-based paint manufacturer. It's called Parsonage Pink from Papers and Paints. And I bought a couple of other colors from them. The olive green bedroom upstairs, which Liz, I can't quite see the color behind you, but it's about the same, I think. It's a sort of lovely brownie. And the dining room I painted in a kind of really mad purple color at the same stage. It was a 1960s. It was a famous color in the 60s called Victoria Plum. And it was a really cool color. And I'd been getting into books by