For more than 20 years, Ben Pentreath has been a champion of exceptional English design, creating homes, interiors, and town developments that are at once traditional and distinctively modern, timeless, and boldly contemporary. An award-winning classical architectural designer and dec orator whose impressive client list includes King Charles, Pentreath and his eponymous studio, Ben Pentreath Ltd, have established a powerful reputation for commercial projects with an abiding sense of history and place, interiors that sing with color and texture, and residences that replace fussy excess with a light, effortless sense of comfort and harmony.

Pentreath’s latest book, An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today, released tomorrow by Rizzoli, showcases two decades’ worth of his projects and explores his distinctive approach to architecture, design, and decoration. The book opens with a foreword by John, Earl of Moray, and an introduction from Pentreath, where he outlines his unique design philosophy, which prioritizes, above all, a strong sense of happiness, history, character, place, color, imperfection, a sense of the endeavor as a whole, and a sense of a project’s place in time.

Succeeding chapters walk readers through a stunning variety of projects, across 352 pages of lush, full-color photographs taken by Pentreath himself. IN THE CITY looks at Pentreath’s urban projects, including the restoration of a house on Regent’s Park, London, with a new roof garden, glowing jewel-tone interiors, and cornices and joinery detailed with an early 19th century quality.

TOWNS & TOWNHOUSES explores the firm’s town development work, most notably the master planning of Poundbury, King Charles’ New Urbanist development, which comprises more than 1,500 buildings and is a triumph of postwar suburban expansion.

A chapter on THE COUNTRY HOUSE showcases rural retreats and historic country homes, among them a dreamlike Jacobean Castle revival in Cornwall, which had to be completely rebuilt and redecorated, with careful attention to historical detail, after a fire ripped through the building in the 1980s.

Finally, a chapter on VILLAGE AND FARM highlights projects that include a romantic West Cornwall seaside escape; a small Georgian farm nestled amid the unspoilt beauty of the eastern Cotswolds; and Pentreath’s own beloved home in West Dorset, a revitalized former parsonage that embodies the exquisite, personal simplicity for which Pentreath is so renowned. More than anything, the projects featured in An English Vision reflect Pentreath’s refined yet playful style, which integrates history, tradition, the different rhythms of time, and the personal tastes of his clients. It is this—the perfect marriage of the enduring and the intuitive—that makes Pentreath’s work so special and so enlivening.

An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today is released tomorrow and is available for purchase via Amazon.

“This sense of the whole is something that architecture
needs to recapture – a whole that, incidentally, is always
greater than the sum of the parts, and where beauty,
wit, intrigue and proportion are our watchwords, as
we try to create an enduring frame for this messy thing
called life.”
Ben Pentreath

ABOUT BEN PENTREATH
Ben Pentreath is an award-winning architectural designer and decorator whose work embodies the highest principles of traditional and classical architecture, as well as urbanism in contemporary society. He studied Art History at the University of Edinburgh before attending the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture. After working for five years in New York and then with the Prince’s Foundation, Ben started his own practice, Ben Pentreath Ltd, in 2004. Since then, the firm has grown to occupy two beautiful studios in Bloomsbury, London. Ben is also co-founder, with Bridie Hall, of Pentreath & Hall, one of London’s most distinctive interiors and decoration shops, located just around the corner from the Ben Pentreath Ltd studios.

Ben is the author of English Decoration (2011) and English Houses (2016). He is also a regular contributor to the Financial Time and runs the Pentreath & Hall blog. In 2023, Ben Pentreath was awarded the prestigious Richard H. Driehaus Prize, given to a major contributor in the field of contemporary traditional and classical architecture; he is one of the youngest laureates of the award. Ben and his husband, Charlie McCormick, a renowned florist, split their time between London, West Dorset, and the west coast of Scotland.