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Ben Pentreath's scheme for fashion designer Charlotte Dellal's home in the English countryside

In an extract from his new book ‘An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today’ House & Garden Top 100 interior designer Ben Pentreath talks about his design philosophy and his scheme for the fashion designer Charlotte Dellal's home in the English countryside
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Ben Pentreath

The restoration was an epic undertaking, carried out with the help of a diligent local architect, but under our watchful eye. We worked our way through rooms and furnishings, all the while making sure this was a house that could be grown into: Charlotte was adamant, quite rightly, that she didn’t want to live somewhere delivered on a plate where everything was finished in one instant. We left gaps on walls and spaces in rooms, where pictures and furniture would one day find a place. I took these photographs a few years after move-in, and things have already evolved since then. That is how I like it, and just how you’ll find it if you work on decorating a house with me.

A favourite Mauny wallpaper in the downstairs cloakroom. With its fireplace and woodburning stove, this is a welcoming little room. You glimpse through to the stair hall beyond.

Ben Pentreath

One of the fortunate things about being a designer who isn’t afraid of learning from history – even, frankly, copying from history quite often – is that the whole sum of human creativity becomes a rich well to drink from, a profound and endless pattern book, as opposed to a burden to compete with but never to use. I love to draw inspiration from the past, often more directly than you can imagine. Is there anything more wonderful than stepping into the shoes of our ancestors, thinking how they thought, looking at their buildings, learning from them by studying details, and bringing strands of history to life again with authenticity and with a deep sense of historical narrative? The trick, I find, with history, is to wear its clothes lightly and to celebrate the multifaceted jewels of experience that it has to offer, drawing inspiration where one likes, without becoming suffocated.

The view beyond is to the glamorous library. The wicker urn is from Atelier Vime, and the curtains are in an exotic silk stripe from Robert Kime.

Ben Pentreath

When it’s all put together in this way, the one thing that exudes from the happy beating heart of a house is the personality of those who live there. It’s this creative energy, between all these ideas, from room to room, and from house to garden and back again, that makes my life as a decorator so interesting. Wearing my architectural hat, I restore the bones, revealing the structure and healing the building. Decoration is about the messy, bright, cheerful thing called life, which covers all that up again, and makes it real, vital and unique.

This is an extract from ‘An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today’ by Ben Pentreath (Rizzoli). Available to buy now.