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Driving into the low hills outside Moreton-in-Marsh, the archetypal Cotswold village, I was slightly concerned about finding John Pawson’s farmhouse from the sparse address I’d been given. I need not have worried. Pawson, probably the most influential British architectural designer of his generation, has for 40 years been a minimalist scourge of chocolate box and chintz. I pass half a dozen farm dwellings in various states of confected picturesque before I reach one that instantly gives itself away with the discreet rigour of its window lines and the angle of its cut stone and the crispest junction of lawn and gravel. I don’t know what the opposite of ramshackle is exactly, but Pawson does.
He and his wife Catherine bought the farm buildings here six years ago. They had been owned by the neighbouring dairy farming family of nine siblings, two of whom, both bachelors in their 80s, had lived in them all their adult lives. The brothers inhabited a bedroom each and a makeshift kitchen in one of the add-ons to the original 17th-century house. The rest of the jumble of rooms and barns were filled with old farm tools and junk, and decorated with wallpapers of uncertain vintage. They are not any longer.
After a brief introduction to the European elm and raw stainless steel of his perfectly hollowed-out kitchen, Pawson, who is a boyish 70 years old, walks me first around the medieval carp pond beside which the buildings are set. He removed 500 lorry loads of silt from the pond, once the preserve of the local monastery, and added a mahogany Cambridge-built punt. “Catherine had always hankered after a place in the country but I was happy in London,” Pawson says of the decision to buy this place. His wife had asked an estate agent to send her details of rose-covered cottages, but among them was this, with its 24 acres of ancient and listed “ridge and furrow” fields. Pawson took a look and thought: this is more like it.
“The old brothers had made the bread oven their telephone booth. They had a cider press,” he says. When he first went up to one attic Pawson discovered a room that no one had set foot in for half a century and which was filled corner to corner by cobwebs illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. His great regret was that he blundered into that spidery domain without his usually ever-present camera.
Over the six years since, he has stripped out and given sympathetic order to the Grade II listed buildings, using lath and plaster for the walls, five eras of clay tiles for the roofs, and employing his trusted palette of local stone – in terrazzo floors – sharp-planed woodwork, Italian marble and as little else as possible. The building now takes its place in a new monograph of a decade of work that includes Pawson’s Design Museum in London, a Cistercian Abbey in Hungary, the Jaffa Hotel in Tel Aviv, and his Life House retreat in rural Powys. (Pawson likes to say he works on “everything from a spoon to a monastery”.)
He sees the Cotswold house as a manifesto as well as a home. Pawson has always been stimulated by the domestic. His breakthrough project, creating stark geometries in the apartment of his first wife Hester van Royen, established his aesthetic. The west London home he created behind a Victorian facade in Notting Hill was the defining interior of the 1990s, ushering in double-height ceilings and ascetic-looking kitchens that met gardens seamlessly through high glass walls.
Home Farm is a greener, rural iteration of that less-is-more dogma. He prefaces a brief note about the building in his pared-back journal – one paragraph and three images for each month – with a quote from Henry Thoreau: “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it and gnaw it still.”
As he walks me around the newly gnawed volumes of his house – with its triple-glazed calm, and delight in perspective (there is a point that allows you to look the entire light-and-shade length of the newly connected 50m interior) – he dwells on its exposed character: the raw 10mm-thick stainless steel of worktops and window frames, which show the watermarks of the foundry process. The subtle shades of the lime plaster walls.
“We are obsessional about detail, obviously,” he says. “And because it is my own place, perhaps even more so. Though it is obviously the last job anyone in the office wants to work on – the boss’s house.”
Before you meet Pawson, you fear he might be as austere as his seamless kitchen cupboards, but he wears any control freakery lightly, giving the sense that his work is serious so he does not have to be (his rooms share that sense, making dining tables a single focus, like stage sets for shared pleasure).
He grew up in a big house near Halifax, on the edge of the moors. His family had a publicly listed textile business that dated to before the industrial revolution. The plan was for him eventually to take a hand in running it, but that lasted until he was 24 and went travelling to Japan. “The yearning was always getting to London,” he says. “but there wasn’t an obvious route, so I escaped and went around the world instead. I started in Japan and never left.” He was 30 by the time he made it to London, by which time the family business was being run by his sister (it was eventually, like all those Halifax textile factories, sold off and closed).
The idea of Japan had come from watching a film made by Tony Richardson, about a Zen Buddhist master. “It was so exquisitely filmed, the monks practising kendo at dawn and all that, I thought, ‘Fuck, this is it, I’ll go there and become enlightened.’” It was 1973. Pawson lasted half a day at a Zen monastery, where they put him to work cleaning. He saw enough in Japan to make him reluctant to return to Halifax, however, and eventually discovered his real vocation when he spent a year – “mostly trying not to get in the way” – in the studio of the great Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He brought Kuramata’s disciplined attention to the beauty of material and form back to London.
That attention, in which every sparse gesture and junction is made to matter, still serves him well. But inevitably, to achieve such idealised simplicity of form requires 30 kinds of human sweat and chaos. At one point in our tour of the house he points out a section of concrete work that provides a link between the buildings. Part of the concrete is smooth, some is more disturbed. “We had this brilliant guy from Belgium do it,” he says. “But each part had to set before the next could be done and getting him back each time was more difficult. He was a passionate guy and going through some issues at the time, and you see that in the finish.” Pawson’s weakness is always to be “too reasonable” in such circumstances, he admits; he has learned to leave on-site negotiation to others. “I get drawn into the human issues, you know: ‘Don’t worry about the wall, just get yourself well.’ On paper and in my head I am entirely obsessional – but not if there is a human cost.”
That contradiction plays out in his manner; he appears too easygoing for someone so committed to precision. In a room that will become a larder once a cooling system has been installed the shelves have become a minor dumping area for kids’ toys and other boxes of stuff – Pawson’s three grown-up children are all regular visitors here; his daughter, the eldest, has a one-year-old son.
“Clutter…” I note.
“Fucking hell!” he says, in mock alarm. And then, as if it is a well-worn internal mantra: “Life’s a compromise when you live with people. When Catherine goes away, I get everything absolutely in order and she goes slightly mad because I tidy up her papers. And within seconds she has messed up my work, but I am so happy to have her back I don’t mind.”
Where does it come from, that impulse to empty space of objects?
“I don’t know. I just remember at a very early age, going back to school [he was at Eton] and really loving travelling light. Having very little just made me feel free.”
Does that mania for clean lines not require constant vigilance though?
“I do enjoy tidying up. These are Catherine’s things,” he says, gesturing to books on a desk. “My instinct would be to put them in a cupboard.” He recalls how he did just that before one journalist came to his house, and there was the question: what are your cupboards like? He opened the one he had crammed stuff into and it all fell out on top of him.
They have had a full year at the finished house now, and are here most weekends and for a month in the summer. Pawson’s original plan was to work here, but he finds that once he arrives his mind seems to empty of deadline pressure. One of the problems of framing all the rolling views with such care is that there is always too much to look at. He still works best, he says, in his windowless basement office at the practice in King’s Cross, where the only visual stimulation is a white wall.
He runs a small office of 25; they do designs and work with other practices on engineering and construction. Over the next five years they will probably have 30 projects that might vary from a hotel to an exhibition, he suggests. “Every one will have some part of it which is me, otherwise there is no point.”
Does he hire people in his own image?
“Definitely not if I can help it.”
How is he as a boss?
“Well,” he says, “People tend to stay. I do have a temper but it is over quickly. I always start the year saying to everyone, ‘OK this year I am not going to lose it’. Usually I make it to 4 January. For my birthday they did a whole load of slogans of things I have yelled at one time or another. My favourite was: “Find me that letter that says I’m a genius!”
In his book, he notes how “the client is the critic”. He says that the sentence he most dreads hearing is: “I have put together some ideas for you to download before we meet.” Some commissions seem like gifts, however. He still cannot believe his fortune in being asked to design the Abbey complex in Hungary. “To begin with I thought it was a joke,” he says. “We used to have lots of wind-ups in the office; people would go out to a phone box and pretend to be a sheikh with an emirate to design or whatever.”
Were the monks exacting clients?
“Well, they gave me a file of every room’s optimum temperature,” he says. “And all 80 of them had been allowed to come up with their own spec. It was all ‘I would like my chest of drawers to be this high’ or whatever.” He obviously disregarded all that and made them all the same.
He stayed at the monastery for a week when it was finished, living in the dorm, getting up with the monks, eating with them, praying seven times a day. It was a silent Trappist order. How did he manage?
“I didn’t get the calling, unfortunately,” he says. “But I could see the attractions of not drinking too much and getting good sleep and not talking. I should really go back every year. Catherine is Catholic and very keen for me to convert.”
It is tempting to see a spiritual impulse in his work – certainly others appear to see it; as well as the Hungarian project he has lately designed a church in St Moritz and a log chapel in a forest in Germany. His books of photographs tend toward the sublime. Does he recognise that in himself?
If it exists he traces it back to childhood. “My mother would have liked me to become a missionary,” he says. “She was the daughter of quite strict Methodists, saintly in a Yorkshire way. The doctor burst into floods of tears when she died.”
He suggests that his mother found her considerable inherited wealth difficult. “She dressed very modestly and didn’t like material things. My father – and I – in contrast, always quite liked the best of things, nice cars, a big old Irish wolfhound for a dog, the best racing bike.”
Would it be fair to say he has found a way of marrying those two forces?
“Perhaps.”
Certainly from the moment that Calvin Klein called to ask Pawson to design his flagship New York store in 1993, versions of his minimalism have attracted that bonus-rich, money-market generation that justifies its outrageous fortune with painful hours in the gym and eye-wateringly expensive interiors that apparently eschew worldly goods. Pawson is currently working on a dozen private houses, as well as two hotels for his longtime collaborator Ian Schrager.
He insists that he still finds his brand of opulent minimalism as bracing as ever. He can’t imagine retirement.
Is it terribly strange to be 70, I wonder?
“I think it was a mistake to celebrate it with a party,” he says, with mock glumness. “Catherine insisted on it. But it now means I can’t pretend it hasn’t happened. Up until then I think I have always vaguely assumed I was about the same age as the person I was talking to, from the mid-30s upwards, at least.” He went to a school reunion of his Eton year not long ago (Sir Nicholas Soames was in his class). “I got there and was directed to a room full of red-faced, white-haired old men. I took one look and thought I had the wrong place.” As he went to leave a voice boomed out: “Pawson!” “I thought ‘Christ, this is me.’”
Catherine calls us to lunch in the kitchen at the long elm table fronting a glass wall that rises like a sash on a vast counterweight. Pawson and his wife are currently writing a cookbook based around the farm kitchen. “At the moment there are a hundred recipes, just everyday stuff,” he says, while admitting that he does “more of the eating and the advising” than the cooking. We share a warm salad of charred peppers and tomatoes on sourdough and then ice cream with a peach compote. Pawson has, of course, designed the plates and the bowls and the cutlery and the water glasses. Their collective effect seems to demand to make each mouthful a mindful haiku. I try not to crunch too hard on the toast.
Is there anything that he hasn’t designed?
He looks around. “I have done the taps. And the light switches, the escutcheons and the door knobs are mine. And these salt and pepper pots.” He picks up a weighty minimalist oval. “I suppose I like to see if I can do better than what there is.”
When he says better, what does he mean?
“Well, simpler,” he says, simply.
John Pawson: Anatomy of Minimum is published by Phaidon, £49.95 (phaidon.com)
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