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- [00:02]
Caroline
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.
- [00:13]
Liz
I head up the creative team. We're your hosts.
- [00:16]
Caroline
Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks and tales from interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. 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@podcastallardesigns.net now, on with the show. Hi, listeners. Before we get to today's episode, I wanted to let you know that my guest Ben Pintereth and I had a great conversation. We talked for way too long, though. So instead of cutting the episode down, we're just going to split it into two parts. So part one today, part two next Tuesday. Liz was under the weather and Taryn was in France. So it's just me and Ben talking about his book and English vision. Though he was lovely, I loved the conversation and I also loved his book. So let's get to the show. Okay. Our guest today is a major treat. Architect and interior designer Ben Pentreath. His design work is expansive, spanning from small interior design projects to designing whole towns. He's been called the best country house architect in Britain. He's designed much of the town of Poundbury in partnership with the Duchy of Cornwall, as well as a new sustainable development in Scotland, Tornagran.
- [01:27]
Liz
Tornagrain.
- [01:28]
Caroline
Tornagrain. Okay, thank you.
- [01:29]
Liz
Yep.
- [01:30]
Caroline
From townhouses in London to country houses and full developments across the uk, Benz's impressive work highlights the best of classic English architecture in a way that suits modern life. All of which he showcases in his new book, An English Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today. Ben, welcome to the show.
- [01:48]
Liz
Thank you so much.
- [01:49]
Caroline
I have to say that I read your book front to back and then I could have just started all the way over because I enjoyed it so much. Just so insightful and poignant in so many places. It seems like you were sort of coming to Revelations while you were writing the book. You know, about simplicity and what makes a great structure and what makes it last and. Yeah, I just thought that was so wonderful to read. I think in today's world, where you wonder why some things last and others are torn down and redone and.
- [02:28]
Liz
Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, thank you. That's very kind. Yeah, I suppose in a way, it's a distillation of a lot of. A lot of things that I've been thinking about for a long time. To a certain extent, you don't really think too much about what you're doing. And it's quite. There's a whole strange thing about writing a book. I mean, there's a strange thing about writing a book anyway, like, why are we doing it? What's it all about? But there's something even more strange about writing a book which is all about your own work. And that's a definite. Like, oh, that's a kind of funny moment. And a few people asked me from time to time, kind of, why are you doing this? And I was like, I don't know why I'm doing it. I sort of. Like, about five years ago I was asked to do it by Rich Oli, which was fantastic. They sort of got in touch. Obviously, they're a fantastic publisher to work with. So I was very excited. I'd done. Done two books before which. Which had been well received a few years ago, but they were all about. I mean, some of my houses were in them. Like my house in Dorset appears in all three in different guises. But those first two books were all about, basically about other people's houses, friends and people I knew a little bit, or houses I knew, buildings I knew, which I wanted to kind of weave. Weave together to tell a story about. About different themes of English decoration. And then, you know, I had a big pause for. While I was actually getting on and working and doing lots of projects. And then, yes, as I say, about sort of four or five years ago now, Rizzoli got in touch and said, would I be interested in producing a book on our studio work? And I said, that sounds delightful. I'd love to. Without really thinking very much about how much is involved, to be honest, a lot. It took a long time, but I had lots of excellent excuses as to kind of why I couldn't quite meet my deadlines.
- [04:28]
Caroline
Sure. Covid. Yeah.
- [04:30]
Liz
I think all publishers are very familiar with authors dodging deadlines. I think it's just part of the industry. But the. Yeah, I mean, one very sad moment for me was when my mum and dad both died within a few weeks, really, of one another. My mother died rather suddenly, very unexpectedly, but, you know, she was old. It was very sad. It was. It was a great loss. But I had to spend a lot of time, as you can imagine, then with my father, who was pretty distraught, and then we were all distraught. And then sort of literally not long after Like a few months after my poor dad, I mean, basically died almost of a broken heart in a way. And so that was. I don't want to be in any way make light of things, but I can now because it's a while ago, but that was my first perfect tail card with Rick. Only my editor, they said, I'm so sorry, like, I've suffered quite a complicated trauma and can I start again next year? And they were like, yes, yes, yes, that's fine. And then, yeah, you're right, you just mentioned Covid. So that turned up just as I was about to start a huge round of kind of traveling over and doing photography and all the rest of it and really starting to do it. So then I called my editor, very long suffering, and I said, philip, I just think we're really going to struggle to get access to kind of houses and, you know, people don't want me and a photographer turning up at the moment, as you can, and we shouldn't really be turning up, as you can understand. And he just said, ben, if your book is late, that is the least of my problems. So then I would.
- [06:13]
Caroline
That's. That's a nice. Yeah, yeah.
- [06:16]
Liz
So then I was given at least another year. And then. And then it started to get a little bit more serious and they were beginning to say, right, okay, time to start delivering material. And I was like, yes, yes, yes. And then I realized that I was trying to fit the whole thing into my kind of normal life and existence and work and work life. And that is quite busy. We've got about 40 people in the design studio here in London in Bloomsbury. There's a. There's a big team of architects, master planning on the, on the new towns and developments. And then we've got a fantastic team of interior designers. And then there's also just the whole administration and the running, the running the practice and all of that. And so what I was finding was that I was setting aside time in my diary. I was just allocating a week here or a week there. I said, right, okay, I'm going to focus on the book then so that I could just do everything else as per normal, kind of run my. Run my meetings, meet my clients, design the buildings, everything else. And that was all well and good, except that every single week that I picked to go to wherever the projects were to take photographs, almost without exception. It was just terrible weather those particular weeks, you know, throughout the year. It was almost like I was jinxed. And it was just dull, flat, light, you know, kind of like Storms blowing in, whatever, like, just not ideal circumstance to really pull together kind of a lot of material. And so then I asked Philip for one more year, and he said, okay, but this time it's the last time. So then finally, sort of over the course of last year and a little bit the year before, I was really making this into a really serious project where I actually. The way that I managed to take all of the photographs over that period of time was just to say this. This is like the trump card which is going to kind of win any other. It's going to beat any other meeting. Any other thing in my diary is going to be superseded by the book. If the weather is right in the north coast of Scotland or whatever it might be, I'm going to have to go. And so whenever we had client, or I mean, sometimes new clients were quite surprised when I sort of said to them, love to meet you, and I'm going to put a date in my diary. But I had a little note prepared saying that I was taking a sabbatical to write my book. And it was like, we're really happy to put things in the diary, but I might have to cancel at short notice, which I regularly did. But then the beauty was that because I hadn't actually got very much in my diary, I could immediately. It was actually a very liberating way to work, you know, because I think we all get into a world where we get incredibly booked at this. This. I think, putting this podcast in our mutual diaries. Yeah, nine months ago or something. I just remember. So, you know, it's. So. It was actually very, very freeing. But then I got into this process of just really thinking about, okay, what is this all about? And that was a challenging question. And it goes back to kind of, why did I want to write a book five years ago? I don't think I talked about it that much then. But as the thing took shape and as I was. It was actually. It's a very unusual moment as an architectural designer, interior designer. It's a really wonderful moment to spend a concerted period of time not just thinking about the next project, which is normally what you're doing. You're normally on the next one, or kind of the current thing, what's it looking like, blah, blah, blah. I was actually able to take a little. It's a very rare moment to have a sort of pause, a moment just to look around, to go back and revisit some houses and buildings and places that in some cases I hadn't been to for a number of years, actually, to see how they're all settling in and bedding in and how people are living there, which is never the same as you entirely plan at the beginning. And then. And then also, as you can imagine, there were a lot of car journeys or train journeys to get everywhere. And so that also gave you a lot of thinking time on the way. On the way back, what's it all about? And so you're right, it is actually a very personal book.
- [10:34]
Caroline
Maybe we could rewind a tiny bit. You can give everyone a little bit of a background. Just our audience who might be unfamiliar with you, a little bit of your background.
- [10:43]
Liz
Absolutely.
- [10:44]
Caroline
Because I especially loved. In one section of the book, you talked about how someone told you when you were young that you could never be an architect. And my careers master. Yeah. So maybe kind of start with that a little bit, and how you got into architecture and then interior design.
- [11:02]
Liz
In English schools, there's very often sort of careers advisory. I don't know if you have that at home, but it's sort of where the careers master is. If I'm being mean, they're kind of like the one person in the school who's probably never done that much kind of exciting with their lives. But, yeah, they're the people who are advising generations of people. So going out into the world. Yeah. What they can do and what they can't do. But Obviously, when you're 15 or 16 years old, you know, if somebody says you can't do that, you sort of. Well, I didn't entirely trust him, but I sort of trusted him. You know, he was in a position of authority. But the reality was that I was always coming in my whole life, I came from an art. Art background, Drawing, painting. Right. I've always loved writing, I've loved reading, I've loved old buildings. I've loved anything to do with the kind of the visual of the written world. And actually, he wasn't entirely wrong. Architecture, to a certain extent is. That is now, it's such a complicated world, architecture, but it is also a scientific and a mathematical and an engineering world. Obviously, you know, thank goodness God created engineers. So I can work with very talented people who can make buildings stand up. And in a certain way, I like to design a building that actually isn't too hard to make it stand up, if you see what I mean. There are a lot of very contemporary buildings out there in the world where people kind of delight in doing things which, if you're staring at that building, you think, this is completely impossible. How does this Even work, huge things which jut out over the hills or whatever, those are always very visually exciting and intriguing, but it's not really what I want to do anyway. So I started out, as I say, from a very early age being steered away from architecture as degree study or as something to go through at university and into the kind of the arts. And I ended up. Well, I also had a history. I loved history at school when I was young. I still love history in a way. The whole of our lives is about a dialogue with history and our place relative to the past and relative to the future. And that's, I suppose, one of the themes which kind of emerges through the book. But yeah, I had a pretty unsuccessful moment where I was sent for an interview at Cambridge University to read history and it was just completely disastrous because they knew I didn't really want to do it and I knew that I didn't really want to do it. So it was just one of those things where I'm like, what are we both doing here? Anyway, so that was that. So I went. I ended up at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The most beautiful city, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. I don't know if you've, if you've been to Edinburgh, it's like this fantastic combination of an ancient medieval capital city of early medieval Scotland. And then in the beginning of the 18th century, in the mid 18th century, as the city had expanded and expanded and was getting incredibly overcrowded, it's sort of the develop. The city fathers decided that they had to build a whole massive extension to the north of the city of Edinburgh called the New Town, which is the most sensational kind of 18th century Georgian development piece of town planning. One of the most amazing pieces of town planning anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the world. And it's. And so as a student aged 18, I kind of found myself living in this incredible place surrounded by incredible buildings, wonderful people, kind of like. It was, it was a mind blowing, brilliant experience living in that wonderful city which I love so much even today. And I was doing history of art and history of architecture, which was like perfect for me. And I was also doing practical painting and art in the Edinburgh College of Art. So it was an amazing degree. It was kind of a bit exhausting. So after a while I gave up the art side on a, on a sort of major basis and I just concentrated on the history side. So then I'm about 21 years old, I guess 22 at this stage, sort of faced with. I knew that I loved buildings I knew that I loved old buildings. I was actually secretly kind of designing loads and loads and loads of new, old looking buildings kind of in my, I mean it was a bit nerdy in my spare time kind of everyone else was like out partying and getting drunk and I was just drawing houses on my little drawing board in my bedroom. It's not quite true, but I was a bit, I was quite a lot. And actually I think what I was doing was creating. I also had this very strong interest in interior design and decoration and the history of design and history of interior decoration. And I think what I was doing in those days was drawing kind of pretend houses which I could then have fun making pretend interior decoration for furniture plants and all the sort of things that people do when they're, you know, a bit nerdy like me, age 17 creative or 20 creative, creatively nerdy. And so I knew that I had this strong passion for it all but I couldn't see a way forward. And that was really going to suit, I think at that moment. And there was a fantastic degree, it's still running, I believe, in a university in a city called York, which is called the architectural conservation degree. And a lot of people who had studied architectural history or art history were going into this world where you could then work for organizations like the National Trust or kind of building restoration organizations, looking after old buildings, restoring them and healing them. And that's a fantastic, it's a fantastic world. And I nearly went into it. And then in my last year at Edinburgh I met a person who actually in my early life, I think everybody has these people in life who were moments in life where people are just very influential and I'm still great friends with, with him. Charles Morris, who was my. Became my first boss. In fact, I'm still really good friends with his whole family and one of his daughters was staying with us in London last night, which is great, we see each other a lot. And so I met Charles. That's another long story. So I won't go into how, but it was great. Just one of those chances of fate that somebody put me in touch with him and he, he came to see, he was giving a lecture in Edinburgh to a little club that we ran with some friends in the history of architecture department. And then I was showing him some of the drawings that I've been doing and he was like, I think you should be going into history of, you know, architectural conservation. I think you should, I think you'd enjoy designing new buildings and I think you should and could and I was like, what? No one's ever said that to me before. Hence that little introduction in the start of my book, which you're right to pick up on. It's like, you know, there I was. And when you're that sort of age, you don't know where life is going to take you. And sometimes it does take somebody to say you can do anything you want, right. In life, if you're, you know, good at it and work hard and devoted to it, you know, everything is possible, even if you haven't at that specific moment done a degree in formal architecture.
- [18:32]
Caroline
Right.
- [18:33]
Liz
So Charles very kindly offered me a little summer job in his office. And I said I'd love to come down. And I went to work for him for a month. And it was a fantastic studio, there were great people there. It was a very idyllic moment of my life actually. Really kind of got such strong and happy memories of that time. And then I was going off to. Traveling with friends all over the place and seeing the world and all the rest of it. But it was just the most fantastic summer. And then at the end of that, something had obviously gone right because he said, well, why don't you come back for Christmas for a month? And I was like, I've got a long holiday at Christmas, I'd love to do that. So I did. And that was getting beginning to get a little bit more serious. I was actually drawing things even after that early period of time, I was doing little drawings of things that were actually getting built, you know, was. That was very exciting.
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Caroline
Yeah.
- [19:23]
Liz
Wow. This is real. This could be real. And then at the end of that, Charles very kindly said, well, why don't you come and work here for a bit and do almost like actually how all architects in history actually learned architecture not in college or university, but as an apprentice in an apprenticeship, basically. And so that's, that's how I started. When I left Edinburgh, I had a fantastic six months when I went traveling with, partly on my own, partly with friends and we, we had an amazing time in Eastern Mediterranean and then Greece, Turkey and then I had the most amazing time traveling down into Syria, which was like just one of the most mind blowing moments of my life being. And sadly it's all obviously now very. Some of those ancient Roman and ancient sites are now very sadly destroyed after the war. But that's, that's a moment I will never forget being in the Roman city of Palmyra on my own one night as the sun went down, like the only person there in the middle of this kind of three and a half thousand year old place. It was incredible. And then, and then I had a, a brilliant time traveling for a few months in India as well. And I came back a bit more grown up as a result of all of that. Some of the crazy experiences I got up to and I worked with Charles for, not for that long, but for about two and a half years in total. And I did by then like, by then this was like a bug. I was addicted. This was, this was going to be my life. I sort of, I didn't know how it was going to end or what was going to happen or what was going to happen next. But I absolutely loved the whole process of designing and working with old buildings or designing new buildings. And Charles was a very, he's a very comprehensive designer. He designs furniture and interiors for people and he's got his own very distinctive language. So it's an amazing place to learn. After a while I decided that I wanted to do actually more architectural studies. So I went to a fantastic, quite young, quite new architectural college, architectural school, which had been set up by the former Prince of Wales, now the King. King Charles, yes, called the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, which was based in London in Regent's park, in one of those beautiful big villas in Regent's park, if anybody knows that part of London. And it was a mind blowing experience. I mean it was crazy. It was absolutely crazy. It was also quite chaotic and quite disorganized and so on. But actually I think if you, if you imagine what it must have been like being in the Bauhaus in 1920, that was probably pretty crazy and pretty, pretty chaotic as well, but, but amazing. So it was almost like the flip of that because at that moment in the 90s, in the mid-1990s, all architectural education really almost exclusively in, in the whole of the United Kingdom, in most of Europe and nearly all of America, apart from the University of Notre Dame, the architectural training was entirely modernist. It was completely a kind of modernist training, teaching architects how to be modernist architects. And you might have done a course in architectural history along the way because that was perceived to be something people should know about. But you weren't taught how to design a classical molding or how to detail the sash window or kind of how to detail anything in traditional architecture. So there I was in this architectural college being taught all of that stuff and how to use old materials and I mean new old materials, but sort of ancient materials, timeless materials, and with fantastic teachers. And it was an amazing experience. It Was. It was, yeah, as I say, it was pretty crazy at times, but we. We all loved it. I had great colleagues on that course and it was a. It was a fantastic experience. I went back to Norfolk to work with Charles for one more year. And then, I have to be honest, I got itchy feet. And I was living. I was living in the most idyllic experience, which I have very, very, very few photographs of. And I can only really describe it. I was living in this ancient, tiny little cottage which I'd sort of rented off a friend. And it was down a long track, kind of with one or two little houses going down, and it ended up sort of in this woods. And there at the end of the track was this little house which I was living in.
- [24:00]
Caroline
It does sound like a movie.
- [24:02]
Liz
It was kind of like being in a film I had created with. With my landlady Caro, who I was renting the house from. She came up every now and again. She lived in London. She was hardly there. I was there the whole time. And we said. We sort of made this mad, crazy, huge garden. I really got into gardening. Uh, and, you know, it's kind of weird, the days before the Internet and phones and stuff like that, you actually had quite a lot of time on your hands. Um, so I read lots of books and had lots of people to stay and painted and, like, it was a very. It was a very fantastic life. But actually, after a year or so, I was like, I need to see a life on a bigger stage. I'm living in a tiny village in the back of nowhere. And like, it's idyllic, but it's almost like a sort of. It was almost too good to be true, and it wasn't quite challenging enough. And through one of my contacts at the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, I was put in touch with a couple of New York architects at the time. And this is in. I guess we're now in about 1997 or 98, who were looking for. Looking for people to go and work for them. And I got in touch with one of them, who is Anne Fairfax, Fairfax and Salmons, who got one of the great New York classical architectural firms. And I said, hey, we had a phone call. I remember again the days where you couldn't just type into Google list, tell me the kind of 15 architectural firms in New York or whatever. You just had to figure it out. You had to find it out. There was no book, there was no guidebook for any of this. Right. Anne and Richard were, as it Happens coming over to London for a week or two. They were coming on a trip. So we met and we met up in London and I had a few drawings and little portfolio. Never really done a proper job interview before in my life. So I didn't really know what to bring. And they gave me a job. And then we had a horrible time waiting for my visa to arrive, but that finally arrived. And then I can remember the day. It was Specifically Valentine's Day, February 14, 1999, I arrived in New York. So that was a. That was a sort of game changer in my life, as you can imagine, another. Another little landmark. And I had the most wonderful time working with them. And in a sense, really what that was, was, was like that sense of being on an apprenticeship continuing because I was. Richard is the most fantastic classical designer. He's got the most incredible, very personal way of designing and detailing and proportioning classical architecture. So I was really learning from somebody who really, really knew and had really figured things out. And we had great fun the whole time. It was hard work, but it was amazing. I was working on a lot of fantastic projects where we were some nihaz, but mainly I was working on restoration, actually, of some beautiful houses in Greenwich Village and doing up really fantastic, you know, brownstones down in West 11th street and Bank street and Charles Street. It was. It was one. It was great fun and it was the most amazing time. So that was. That was five very happy years of my life. And you can see at this stage, I'm now, I guess, sort of in my very early 30s. I'm sort of 31 or something, 32. And I adored living in New York. I still love New York. I love America. It's just the best country in the world. And, you know, sometimes you need to be reminded of that because everyone's kind of doom and gloom these days. But it's just great, you know, and we need that sense of optimism and opportunity that I think America offers. And so. But there was a sort of weird tipping point then for me of, okay, do I stay here forever? I was beginning to actually settle into life quite right. I loved it there so much. I had so many great friends. I actually started to apply for a green card. And to go through that process, there was a whole moment which was. I mean, talk about poignancy. And I think I write about this a little bit in the. In the book about, you know, actually watching one of the. One of the planes go into one of the Twin Towers, the second plane, obviously, and with my own eyes and that was a pretty grueling time for New York. And it definitely took an edge off things in a way for us all living there, particularly living downtown. It was very present, and maybe. Maybe that was a little wee tipping point. But actually, in a way, it was more. I just actually started to feel homesick. I started to feel homesick for my family and I started to feel homesick for England, I suppose that rather idyllic idea of the English countryside. And I missed green winters. One of the things about living a nice.
- [29:11]
Caroline
That's true.
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Liz
Gosh, you know, temperate, rainy England, where it never gets that cold, you know. Yeah. We might get snow for a few days, but it goes. And it's never that cold. Is that even in the midst of winter, you know, the whole countryside goes. Goes black and gray and steely, but. And brown. But fundamentally, it's green because we live in this grazed grass landscape. And I really miss that because the American winter is.
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Caroline
It's pretty bleak.
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Liz
It's. It's dry and it's desiccated and it's. It's brown without any green. Yeah, yeah, it's got the. It's got the green of little.
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Caroline
Oh, gosh. And especially New York. There's so few trees to begin with. And then.
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Liz
Yeah, yeah, this is it. And so anyway, so then. So then it was just one of those moments, and it was like, right, it's time to come home. And I did. I moved back. That was in 2003. And I can remember that date as well very distinctly because I left New York. Really bad timing. On the night of the Halloween parade in the Village.
- [30:17]
Caroline
I'll never make my flight.
- [30:19]
Liz
Leaving my. Leaving my flat kind of in a taxi, trying to get to Newark Airport and kind of thinking, am I ever going to make it? And I was like, you know, tears were kind of like streaming down my face because I was so sad at leaving all my friends and my life. But I made this decision, and then I was kind of surrounded by crazies, you know.
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Caroline
Yeah.
- [30:42]
Liz
Anyway, so that's a sort of positive history. And then that takes us up to almost 20 years ago. I then came back to London and the Prince's Institute of Architecture, his architectural college, had sort of morphed by then a few years later into more of an architectural charity, pressure group, which handled all of His Royal Highness's very broad interests in the built environment. That is really what first led me down to Poundbury, the Prince's town in Dorchester, which obviously I've now worked on a lot. But it was we were working all over the country on a huge wonderful kind of variety of projects ranging from, I mean one of my favorite projects was a self build project with young kids in Birmingham building their own community center. And some of them were kind of 13, 14, 16 years old. And I was helping a team help them design and build this fantastic community youth center which is still there and very much loved and used. And that's a really wonderful kind of project to work on. Some of them were very small and very individual things to do with buildings where the Prince of Wales was fundraising for building projects. And we were brought in to help advise the architects on kind of what was happening or what they should be looking at and thinking about. And some of them, obviously with these were these broad, large scale urban design projects. And I worked there for a while and I was still doing, I was doing little bits of design work on the side for people. And there was suddenly a sort of moment which I do write about, which was again one of those little funny key moments in life, deciding moments where I'd done some house design for a housing developer in Poundbury, in fact, a little kind of design for some terraced houses. And then the following year they said, oh, well, now we're doing the rest of it and they're basically the same. So we're going to give you a little repeat fee for these houses. You know, you'd already done them but we're going to pay you a little bit more. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. Didn't expect that. And suddenly I had enough money in the bank to pay rent, my little flat rent for two or three months. And I thought, wow, I could actually, you know, go out on my end now. So I did, I just decided. So I told everyone and that was all fine. And so that was, that was, that was 2004 and that's a 20 year journey from now to. And it was, it was the summer of 20 of 2004 that I set up on my own. So then the rest is history. Yeah, it's the book. I'm going to stop talking for a minute, let you ask a question.
- [33:22]
Caroline
I found it so interesting, you know, when you were talking earlier about someone telling you that you couldn't do it and building into designing whole towns. I mean, what a, what an arc. And then. Yeah, but, but I was really struck by, by Poundberry and the town in Scotland you're working on because you were talking about repetition and simple gestures and building something and sort of realizing you say this much more eloquently in the book, so maybe you can repeat it.
- [33:49]
Liz
But like everyone, everyone in the world, everyone in the western world or the kind of the developed world and the developing world. Let's not forget the vast pressures on development in Africa and the intensely rapid urbanization of places that is happening everywhere now or Asia. But in our world, the world that I live in, the world of American post Second World War to the current day, that sort of 70 year span, 80 year span of development, fundamentally we all live completely, inevitably, there's nothing we can do about it now. There's, there are things, but there's not a lot we can do about it now. We live in a world that has been designed for better or for worse. I mean, when it was done at the time it was with good intention, but then, as I often say, the road to hell is paved with good intention. We live in a world that is completely, inexorably designed purely around private cars to move around. And that has, that single fact has kind of shaped all of our development patterns and structures and frankly our entire way of life now for 30 or 40, 50 years. And I suppose that it was actually not that long after we as a, as, as a society invented capitalist suburban sprawl, if you want to call it that, as a system, and then perfected it in the 80s and the 90s and the noughties. It wasn't long after the invention of this, this, this type of development entirely based around cars, often based around demolition of old and historic places and all their degradation and their replacement with new sprawl kind of further out from the center of this. So the hollowing out of old towns and cities which we've all witnessed, you know, by the late 70s or 80s there was, there was a very strong movement beginning to develop in both the architectural conservation world saying it's just simply not right to knock down swathes of old parts of cities because the street width is inconvenient for six lane motorways to kind of pass through. You know, this is, this is not, this is not something we can do. And obviously in, in Britain and in America, you know, that happened on a massive scale in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and into the 90s. I mean Glasgow, great one of the great Scottish cities, you know, they were completing their inner city motorway network like really quite late into the end of the end of the 20th century, into the 21st century, which is shocking when you really think about what was going on. And then equally there was a sort of growing network of thinkers and Writers, polemicists. Leon Creer is the master planner of Poundbreet in America. You have Andreas D. Of the fantastic master planning firm practice dpz, based in Florida. Andreas and Leon knew each other well. They had met, they were sharing similar philosophies. They're by no means the only two in America. There was this very early kind of development of a whole extended now for a huge group of people called the Congress for the New Urbanism, the cnu, which was devoted to understanding different ways of building patterns of development. And basically what Leon in England, he's the one I really know. He's the master planner of Poundbury. He met Prince Charles in the early 80s and that's another whole long story. But they hit it off and Leon was ultimately commissioned to design this large new housing scheme that the Prince of Wales was planning on the edge of a town in Dorset in the west of England called Dorchester. And the Prince of Wales has this huge landowning organization called the Duchy of Cornwall, which is a very historic estate. It was set up in the 14th century to give an independent income to the heir to the throne. It was sort of like designed to avoid arguments between the King and his son, which has been pretty successful over the centuries. And so when you are Prince of Wales, when you're waiting to become the monarch, you have this huge independent estate, nothing to do with the Crown Estate or with the, you know, the monarch's wealth. It's entirely the Prince of Wales's project. Obviously Prince William is the new Prince of Wales and he's now inherited that. And he's actually bringing in his own fantastic interests, which are very respectful of his father's interests, but a bit different. You know, he's really interested in the challenge of homelessness in this country. And he's now trying to work out how his landowning organization can help provide challenges, solutions to sort out the challenge of homelessness, for instance. It's a different narrative, but it's all part of the same bigger picture. He's also highly interested, as is his father, in sustainability. And obviously the King, the former Prince of Wales, when he started talking about a lot of the things that he was talking about, about where our food is coming from, about how land is farmed, about patterns of development. When he was first talking about this in the 1980s, he was widely ridiculed by huge sections of the so called intelligentsia that the so called design elite just thought that he was backward looking and completely ridiculous.
- [39:47]
Caroline
Isn't that fascinating?
- [39:49]
Liz
And obviously the deep irony is that now with the benefits of hindsight, it's absolutely fascinating going back to his early speeches. I mean he was giving speeches in the 1970s when he was in his 20s, about plastic and oceans, plastic pollution in oceans. You know, it's like at like.
- [40:09]
Caroline
Right, right.
- [40:10]
Liz
He was just architect. Yeah, they were talking about then. So anyway, yeah, so Prince Charles had been approached by the local town council, the regional council in Dorset, saying okay, we need more land for housing on our county town, Dorchester on the edge, please. And your estate owns all the land. Now historically, every time more housing was needed, a request was put in from Dorset County Council to the Duchy of Cornwall and another huge parcel of land would just get sold and suburban housing estates got built all over it. You know, anytime from 1930 to the, to the 1980s and the prince was getting into architecture in a big way. It's what led to his architectural school. He wrote a brilliant, he did a TV program which is fascinating. Your listeners can still watch it on YouTube. It's called a Vision of Britain. My title is not a director of half of that book and TV show. It lays out and you can buy the book. It's everywhere. It's a secondhand book now. It's not published but it's really widely available on a books or secondhand book dealers because it was very, very widely printed and read at the time and it's very influential. It's got a lot of interesting ideas. It's fascinating to read it because a lot of what he was talking about has now really come to pass in, in, in a much bigger way now. Yeah, he was so before his time.
- [41:40]
Caroline
I guess you would think.
- [41:41]
Liz
Yeah, I really, yeah, I really do believe that. I really do. And you know, people can say what they like, but the, but the sort of the proof of the pudding is in the eating is a little expression which comes, you know, he really has walked the. He's, he's, he's been on that journey for an incredibly long time. Leon obviously was a, he is a, an academic, he is an architect, he's a designer, he's an urban planner and he's also what's called a polemicist. Like he's somebody who in the 70s and early 80s was intentionally kind of winding up the kind of, you know, trying to pin prick the pomposity of the modernist architectural experiments and equally understanding how structures of settlements and how we move around is just such a, it's far more fundamental than what buildings look like actually as to how we kind of all live, but obviously how buildings look like is really important as well. So the two. So Leon got the commission to master plan Poundry. It set off in the early 90s. I've been involved there now for a long time, for the last 15 or 20, 15 years, pretty seriously. And in the next few years, probably two or three years time, the development will complete. It's got two and a half thousand houses in it, so it's got about seven and a half, 8,000 people living in it. So it's a very major extension to the town of Dorchester. But unlike all of those suburban sprawl examples that we can see everywhere in the world, wherever we go, it's Leon's plan has delivered and it's actually delivered. It's there on the ground. It's the most amazing place to visit if people are find themselves. It's beautiful in the south of England. It's fascinating and it has a lot of visitors now all around. People from all around the world are coming every year, tens of thousands of visitors, urban designers, students, architects. Like, it's fantastic. So Leon designed the whole place around a series of small walkable neighborhoods. So the whole point is that if you live in a house, you should have all of your daily needs. So not everything you need in your entire life, but your daily needs. So that is like a food shop, maybe a post office, cafe, a pharmacy, doctor. I mean hopefully you're not going to the doctor every day, but those sorts of the dentist, the hairdresser, those sorts of things, restaurants, your daily needs within a 5 to 10 minute walk of every single house. So every single house in Poundbury is planned around a whole series of little designed neighborhoods which have got pubs, shops, cafes, restaurants, offices and so on and so forth, all clustered in amongst the development. And into that we've also built employment space. So obviously all of those shops and cafes and businesses are employing people. But then we've built commercial office spaces. So there's lots of people have got their solicitor's office or you know, whatever the, whatever the company might be. So some of these businesses are public. You know, anybody can walk in there like a shop or a cafe. And then some of them are just commercial offices, but they're all dotted in amongst the whole development. And now there are two and a half thousand houses. There's something like, I can't quite remember the numbers but it's about 2,800 people work every day in the town, in this little village. The town extension, the urban extension that Leon has designed. So there's more than one job for every Single house. Now, not everybody who lives in Penbury works in Penbury. That would be pretty crazy and unusual. But actually about 30% of people who work in Poundbury do live in Poundbury. So then those people are actually able to walk to work every single day. So we've designed a new place where every single day people can actually just walk to work. And this is not like living in a city. Like if you live in, you know, a city or downtown district or you know, a historic place. Yeah, you expect that part of the quality of life. It's part of why you don't have, you know, countryside surrounding you. It's, you live in a dense place, right, where you, you can leave your flat or your apartment or your house and you can walk to where you work. One of the great pleasures. Pleasures. Or get on a bus or like simple public transport. But in Poundbury, this is a brand new place where we've achieved that. It's completely revolutionary and amazing. Then one of the fascinating parts about it is, was very much the inspiration of the Prince of Wales, the former Prince Wales, although the new Prince of Wales. There's even more into this which is incorporating social housing. So affordable housing, what used to be called in England council housing, where people on a housing needs list, you know, for whatever reason, they're on the housing needs list. And we've had this long tradition in Britain of providing the government, providing high quality housing for those people to live in. As the 20th century progressed, it went on quite a rocky road. And that's a whole history which we can't get into here. But one of the things which was happening in Britain in the 1990s is that developers were segregating off that, that contribution that they were obliged legally to make and saying, well, we don't want those people here, you know, we want to build very private, fancy houses, blah, blah, blah. And the Prince meanwhile, was visiting huge numbers of places where it was all social housing. And that can in itself create its own problems because, I mean, again, we don't need to go into that now. But you can imagine kind of like if you take a lot of people who are possibly struggling a little bit in life for whatever reason, which is why they've been given a subsidized, affordable government house. It's not necessarily the best idea to put all of those people like right in one spot each other, particularly if I can say a lot of the time, because it was government designed projects. Modernist architects in the 60s and 70s had a field day kind of doing their crazy architectural Experiments with concrete or tower blocks or buildings which are, you know, potentially quite dystopian, because the people occupying those houses had no choice about the style of house. Whereas if you're buying a private house, you've got a degree of agency over where you live. But if you're being given a house, you don't have any agency over what it looks like. So there was a lot of experimentation going on.
- [48:21]
Caroline
I hadn't considered that before.
- [48:22]
Liz
Yeah. And it's the same in the United States as well. And so the Prince's solution to this was that he felt very strongly on a personal level that the social and affordable housing provision should be sort of invisibly pepper potted through the development as a whole is that we use this expression, pepper pot. So it's just dotted in each street, in every single street and every single block of housing, you know, a proportion of it, about 30, 40%, a proportion of it is low cost housing. And then the remaining balance is private market housing. And the private developers who were building the private houses sort of said, oh my God, it'll never work. We'll never sell a house next door to a council house. Guess what we've sold? Two and a half. Well, we sold 1,800.
- [49:14]
Caroline
Whatever 60% is.
- [49:16]
Liz
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whatever 60% is, exactly. Very, very successfully. And the housing providers, the registered housing providers who provide all of the social housing, thought that they were going to be in a complete mess where they couldn't manage it all. Guess what? If you give people a really nice house, I mean, this is a bit simplistic, but if you give people a really nice house, really well built, nicely designed in a street where it's absolutely indistinguishable from the private housing next door. The interesting thing is that in Poundbury, the evidence, very clear evidence there is that all of that housing needs far less management than equivalent estates elsewhere. And, you know, there are all sorts of reasons as to why that might be, but it's a very, very powerful statistic. So that's a massive game changer. And obviously the other thing which wraps into it is that we, we did this thing where nearly all development, I mean, this is especially true in America, but it's true here as well. In England, all development, all developers like to build just for a single type of person. So you have a lot of estates in your country which are gated executive homes, estates, and they have got a whole series of giant houses. They're all the same demographic, they're all big houses with the same sort of people all living around a big cul de sac in the middle. And then you've got starter home developments, which is for the young couples who are starting home. And you've got senior living for people in, you know, the later years of their life. And you know, that's true seniors. And you know, we, and we do this in England as well. Developers are very good at trying to build a single, almost a single type of house for a single type of person on quite a large scale.
- [51:03]
Caroline
Sometimes deficiency, I suppose, but huge.
- [51:06]
Liz
Well, they think they know their perfect market and so that's all they're interested in. They don't like range. So you have golf club developments or you have kind of like starter home developments or whatever it might be. And what they've done in Poundbury, this is Leon. It's just every street has got a mix. So it's got flats, got apartments. Those apartments might suit very young people. Or if we put lifts in, they'll work really well for older people. We've got small houses with gardens. We've got big detached houses. We've got a whole range from small to large all through the development. So that realistically, if your life circumstances change, like you have an extra kid or you kind of want to downsize or whatever it is, you can actually live your whole life without having to leave the development if you chose not to. Obviously you can go anywhere you like. But so often planning today forces people to then move from one side of town to the other side of town because they've gone up in the world, you know, they've got more money. So then the fancy house is kind of three miles away, Right. From their old friends and neighbors. So all the time, all of these tiny little things are to do with like how we build, how we create places which, which, which build community. And actually really what we're trying to do is just learn our lessons from how great places function, mentioned in the past. But still, you know what, you can actually have a car. You can make sure you can park it. Yes. You can have like bathrooms and kind of modern conveniences. Just because your house looks old or just because it's designed in a way that, you know, respects local patterns of development. You're not trying to, you're not trying to kind of banish modern technologies. You know, they're perfectly sensible. Why wouldn't, why, why wouldn't we have like energy efficient heating? You know, because sometimes people say, oh, well, you're, you're designing as a traditional architect. Well, you need to be kind of walking around, you know, how dare you use, you know, an iPhone or AirPods or a laptop type of thing.
- [53:04]
Caroline
That is interesting. I hadn't thought about how the urban planning or I suppose, lack thereof really. I guess you just don't really think of how it impacts the smaller elements of your life. And also, you know, you think of it maybe if it's like a bad traffic light or something or. Yeah, you know, but.
- [53:26]
Liz
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's really interesting. So, so then the development in Scotland, Tournigrain, which is sort of like the next generation from Poundbury. It's one of my favorite projects is that is a really large new place, 6,000 houses being built to the east of Inverness by an aristocratic estate. The Earl of Murray is the landowner and he's a fantastic guy. He's a tiny bit older than me. We're such close friends now. We've worked together on that project for so long. But he had a similar vision. He, he was being approached by the local council who wanted to come up with plans for very large new housing developments where he lived. It's a very beautiful part of Scotland up in the northeast, just outside of Inverness. And he felt pretty troubled by a kind of. It was well intentioned, but he felt quite troubled by what he was hearing. And so he hired Andres Duani from Miami, the other master planner who I mentioned earlier, to do the strategic master plan for To Grain. And then my firm, we've been involved all the way through, which is now about 18 years ago that we started. And then my firm has now taken that on in much more detail with the detailed hand planners and architects. And it's just, I mean you can see all the pictures in the book.
- [54:43]
Caroline
It's beautiful.
- [54:44]
Liz
Yeah, we're not really allowed to have favorite projects, but it's kind of my favorite project.
- [54:48]
Caroline
And that's our show. You can find all of the show notes on our blog howtodecorate.com podcast to send in a decorating dilemma, email your questions to podcastallarddesigns.net so we can help you with your space. And of course, be sure to follow us on social media at Ballard Designs. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And please leave us a review. We'd love to hear your feedback. Until next time, Happy decorating.