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 decorator, Pentreath has established a powerful reputation for 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. An English Vision, Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today showcases two decades’ worth of Pentreath’s projects and explores his distinctive approach to architecture, design, and decoration.
Pentreath shares his unique design philosophy, which prioritizes, above all, a strong sense of happiness, history, character, place, color, imperfection, a sense of the endeavor, and a sense of a project’s place in time. Pentreath walks readers through a stunning variety of projects, which are grouped into urban projects, towns and townhomes, country homes, and villages and farms. There is also an up close look at King Charles’ New Urbanist development, on which Pentreath serves as the master planner for the community.
A revitalized former parsonage in West Dorset serves as Pentreath’s personal home and embodies the exquisite simplicity for which he 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.
