BARE ESSENTIALS
Clockwise from top left:
Donald Judd’s Bookshelf
14 in the master bed-
room; a bathroom with
a wood-faced marble
counter; Catherine
Pawson designed the
garden; the drawing
room with a Gustavian
sofa and a table by Poul
Kjaerholm; chairs by
Donald Judd; a bed by
Pawson in the master
bedroom; Pawson
designed details down to
the sink basins; a view
into the study with a table
by Kjaerholm. Opposite:
A view of Home Farm.
I
F THERE’S a thread that runs through most of
John Pawson’s work, it is his unwillingness
to water down any part of his vision of how
things ought to be. Pawson, 70, is a patriarch
of minimalism in architecture. For the past
30-odd years he has explored the richness of
empty space in stores for Calvin Klein and Jil Sander,
hotels for Ian Schrager and various monasteries,
churches and museums. But it’s mostly on behalf of
private clients—Jann Wenner and Fabien Baron, to
name two—who believe that, as the old saying goes,
simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Over that time, Pawson’s vision has been remark-
ably consistent, even narrow in the way it sweeps
away ornamental distraction. But it more than com-
pensates in its astonishing precision. Its power comes
from its mastery of tightly controlled
gestures, a Noh theater of design.
Small compromises creep in, of
course—a hairline seam in a kitchen
countertop, say. Left to his own devices,
Pawson would have found some her-
culean way to make that countertop
seamless. But that’s life. There are
always clients to contend with, and cli-
ents have habits and budgets (although
in Pawson’s case, those budgets tend
to be as pharaonic as his projects
are plain).
Few concessions to a reality that
ensnares even the rich manage to
intrude at Home Farm in Chastleton,
smack in the center of the Cotswolds
golden triangle between Stow-on-the-
Wold, Moreton-in-Marsh and Chipping
Norton. It took Pawson five years to
transform this stone farmyard into a
country retreat for himself, his wife,
Catherine, 62, and their children. What
you get here is pure Pawson, freed from
even his own loose shackles.
Take the sink in a guest bathroom.
“Well, there is a certain contradiction
in making the sink from a huge block of
marble, then leaving just the edge vis-
ible and putting wood over the rest of
the marble,” allows Pawson. “I’ve never
done this before—a thin leading edge.
It just appealed to me. It doesn’t make
sense from a lot of points of view, but it
made sense for me. It’s my own house,
and I’m able to do it. When it comes to clients, they can
decide. I didn’t want any restrictions.”
That uncompromising spirit hovers over this clus-
ter of farm buildings built over several centuries,
starting in 1610, from warm, faintly golden Cotswold
limestone. It was a daunting undertaking. Everything
apart from the stone shells themselves had to be
taken apart and put back together again—some 7,000
square feet of space with 57 windows. Except where
he’s had a good reason not to, Pawson has designed
just about everything inside the house himself—door
handles, banisters, window sashes, everything. Door
frames of raw Swedish stainless steel (“It’s the best”)
were cut out from a single sheet, like a big rectangular
doughnut. That may leave you wondering what to dowith all that steel in the middle, but it’s a good way to
make sure there are no seams in the frame.
Excessive? No doubt. Yes, you could probably
have found something very much like that Pawson-
designed coat hook at Ikea—it’s just a dull-gray
wedge, not much bigger than a thumb. Suggest as
much to Pawson, and he will chuckle derisively in
response. When you’re sifting the grain this fine,
“very much like” doesn’t come remotely close.
His fierce aesthetic notwithstanding, Pawson
doesn’t come off as a fire-breathing John Brown of
minimalism. He’s affable, funny, even a little dreamy.
He can let his sentences trail off, seeming to lose
interest before he hits the end. His evident tough-
mindedness is wrapped in a fuzzy layer of diffidence.
He is very English. Pawson isn’t wild about the wordminimalism. It doesn’t mean very much. But he’s not
going to be a bore and make a fuss about it either.
“Journalists are always trying to connect people
to movements, so they found people right on the
edge, I would say, of simplicity—I mean, not at all
simple—and bunched us all together as minimalists,”
says Pawson. “It seemed odd to protest too much, so, I
mean, I’ve just gone along with it.”
The word works well enough as you follow the
gravel driveway to Home Farm. There’s virtually
nothing to sidetrack the eye from the straight lines
of these beautiful stone buildings (well, straight-
ish; in architectural jargon, this is a “disordered
farmyard,” which means that buildings are not at
right angles to one another). Across the courtyard, apretty, shovel-nosed punt sits on the cobbled landing
to a small pond. It’s more sculpture than transporta-
tion: The pond is much too small for boating and was
used only to wash the farm’s carts.
On the banks is Pawson’s idea of a picnic table:
a white marble slab and two side benches, all four
inches thick (it’s part of a line of furniture Pawson
designed for the Italian company Salvatori). The
table and benches weigh almost two tons; Pawson
had to put a special foundation underneath so they
wouldn’t sink into the soil. Pawson likes his materi-
als brawny, and he works them hard—“adventure in
procurement” is how the English architecture critic
Rowan Moore describes it. Pawson doesn’t disagree.
“Well, I’ve always had that thing of pushing things
a bit.” Then the English rim shot. “I just don’t like
things that wobble, you see.”
John and Catherine Pawson had been
looking for a weekend place in the neigh-
borhood for some time before they found
Home Farm. She has family close by, so
the couple had been to the area on trips
from their home in London’s Notting
Hill. They got wind of a working family
farm with several dilapidated outbuild-
ings for sale (the main one had most
recently housed two thirsty old broth-
ers with a cupboard full of empties that
Pawson inherited). The property ticked
off all the right boxes, or all of John’s
boxes, anyway. “Catherine wanted a
tiny cottage with a rose-covered thing.
She said, ‘Well, this is what we don’t
want,’” he says. “I took one look and
said, ‘I think this is what we do want.’ I
didn’t look at anything else and bought
it straightaway.”
They’ve been together for over 30
years and have a son, Ben, 29. By now,
that kind of conjugal sparring has
worked its way into Pawson’s patter.
He grumbles that she messes up his
pristine picnic bench with pillows. She
loves to cook and leaves stuff around
on his untouchable countertops. And
why can’t he save a little money and
just put Formica on the laundry room
shelf? In this low-key English version of
The Honeymooners, she’s the sensible,
even-tempered one, and he’s the Eton-
educated grump.
There’s probably some truth there, but another
side of things is on display. Catherine is an interior
designer herself, and early on spent formative years
with the florally inclined English firm of Colefax
and Fowler. It’s hard to think of a sensibility further
removed from Pawson’s. But once you know where
to look, you can feel her gentle touch everywhere
around the house—the straight-legged Gustavian
sofa facing the big inglenook, for example. Catherine
bought it, and it warms up the room better than the
fireplace. And while it seems unlikely that Pawson
has ever uttered the words “window treatment,”
there they are: drapes!
“Those are Catherine’s undyed boiled-wool cur-
tains,” says Pawson. “The wool is very similar to the119