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house looks stunning in the photos, as it does here, but
any photos miss a critical element of Pawson’s work.
Pawson spends a great deal of time reflecting on what
his rooms feel like, as opposed to what they look like.
At his best, he achieves a kind of spatial harmony that
exudes its own stripped-down sensuality. It can only
really be experienced from inside.
Pawson is just finishing work on a house carved out
of a hillside in the Italian Tyrol. The owner is Michael
Maharam, who sold his textile business in New York
and moved there. “What John does is not a forgiving
form of architecture. You have to get everything right.
But what people don’t understand is that if you reduce
the palette, and all the alignments are perfect, it has
an extremely calming influence,” says Maharam. “It
just feels good to be in it.”
The way Pawson tells it, he didn’t
really choose to become a minimalist. It
was more like he had minimalism thrust
upon him. Pawson’s father owned a thriv-
ing textile mill in Halifax, in Yorkshire’s
West Riding, close to the north end of
England. The family was rich, but the
iron spine of Methodism ran through it:
“nonconformist, stripped-back chapels,
no musical accompaniment, you know,”
says Pawson.
“I had four sisters, and mine was the
smallest room. It was only wide enough
for the bed to get in,” he continues. “As
my sisters left home, Dad knocked walls
down, so I got a bigger room each time,
but I didn’t acquire any more things,
and I had very few clothes and such.”
There was beauty, too. Pawson grew
up in the shadow of the Piece Hall, a
great square commercial arcade from
the 18th century with row upon row of
uniform columns. Not far away was that
natural monument to nothingness, the
treeless moors of North Yorkshire. It’s
all inside him. “You can’t keep Halifax
out of the lad,” says Pawson.
Somebody else might have rebelled
into decadence. Pawson ran away to
become a Zen monk in Japan but ended
up teaching English for three years. “It
didn’t work out,” is all he says. Instead,
in the mid-’70s he found a different kind
of Zen master in the Japanese designer
Shiro Kuramata, whose abstracted
forms are often mere suggestions. “I think I owe it
all to him,” says Pawson. “There was nobody doing
something minimal or interesting, and then here it
was—everything I thought about and dreamt about.”
For several months, Pawson showed up at
Kuramata’s studio, taking in his wisdom. Eventually
Kuramata pushed Pawson out of the nest, so he
enrolled in London’s prestigious Architectural
Association School of Architecture. He left in 1981,
one year short of his qualifying degree, and started
practicing the trade whose name he is still forbidden
to speak (technically, he’s not allowed to call himself
an architect, and the profession’s gatekeepers can
get sniffy when somebody else does).
At the time, Pawson was living with the art dealer
Hester van Royen—they had a son, Caius, now 33—
and a lot of Pawson’s early projects were for her
and her friends. Which is how he came to refurbish
a Belgravia garret for the celebrated writer Bruce
Chatwin, another Yorkshire lad who was as clutter-
phobic as Pawson. Chatwin wrote glowingly about it
in his 1984 essay “A Place to Hang Your Hat.” He also
wrote Pawson a letter, and Pawson warmly antici-
pated the great man’s gratitude. “I got everything
ready and opened it very carefully,” says Pawson,
savoring the self-deflating punch line to come. “It
was, like, Have you fixed the leak in the kitchen sink?
It was Bruce Chatwin’s bloody punch list!”
It took Calvin Klein to bust Pawson out of his tidy
London ghetto. At the suggestion of Ian Schrager,
the American hotelier, Klein hired Pawson in 1993 tocreate his flagship store in New York City on Madison
Avenue and 60th Street (the store was remodeled in
2017 and closed this year). “This was a very big deal,”
Klein recalls. “John and I were on the same wave-
length. I wanted John’s look so it would be about the
clothes rather than the architecture. Form followed
function. I was passionate about that store.”
For his part, Pawson got a lesson in American
chutzpah from Klein that has served him well. “It was
extraordinary. He had this thing that nothing was
impossible. When I said, as a joke, ‘You should just
get one piece of glass for the 30-foot-high windows,’
he said, ‘Yes, do it,’ and I thought, Oh, damn, I’m sure
I can’t do that,” recalls Pawson. The windows went
in—each pane actually 34 feet tall—even thoughthey had to close down Madison Avenue. In its own
way, the marble picnic table at Home Farm can thank
Calvin Klein.
The store, a study in black and white and lots of
air, blew more than a few minds. It also made Pawson
the instant avatar of a certain kind of look and, more
important, a certain kind of thinking. All of a sudden,
postmodernism started looking pretty dumb.
That thinking sometimes takes it on the chin. As
the New Yorker cartoon put it, “Only the rich can
afford this much nothing.” Don’t expect a rebuttal
from Pawson. “It is big, and it is expensive, you know.
It’s sophisticated architectural simplicity. This isn’t
a religious thing, and it isn’t as simple as you can go.
You can go a lot simpler than this.”
There are those, too, who say that Pawson’s rig-
orous aesthetic can lead to sameness
and predictability, that one empty
space looks much like another. Not so
at all, says Schrager, who has worked
with Pawson since the early ’90s and
is currently finishing a hotel in West
Hollywood with him. “There’s a very
obvious and consistent sensibility there,
but I could never tell what John’s work
was going to turn out to be until I was
in it,” says Schrager. “I’ve been around
a long time, and I’ve seen architectural
fashions come and go—shabby chic,
high tech. John transcends fashion. He
just continues to distill and refine his
work over and over.”
At first, Pawson meant to work out of
Home Farm, too. What is now the guest-
house was conceived in part as a studio.
The Kjaerholm filing cabinet is all that
remains of that plan. “I was going to
have people from London, maybe hire
people locally. And then I get here, and I
can’t even think of working. It’s like my
brain just...which is nice.”
He says he is having a hard time
keeping up the pace of his early career.
The constant travel wears him down.
“It used to be easy, but now it’s.... Also,
it’s very intense. You’re always trying
to do something very special.”
Slowing down for Pawson isn’t all
that slow. He takes photos constantly
and has always used the camera as his
third eye. In 2017, Phaidon published
Spectrum, a book of his photos, many of them first
posted on his Instagram (“I said, ‘Well, I’m not a pho-
tographer,’ and they said, ‘You are a photographer,’ so
now I’m a photographer”). A collection of black-and-
whites from around Home Farm will be sold as prints
by Phaidon this fall. And then there’s a new cookbook
he’s collaborating on with Catherine (“a lot of veg-
etarian, but of course, you have to put in meat and
things like that”).
He keeps tinkering with Home Farm, too, even if
that means shifting something an inch to the left or
an inch to the right to catch a slant of afternoon sun.
“There isn’t a point where you could just walk in and
it’s done, you know?” It’s Pawson’s way of stopping to
smell the roses. Except without the roses. ON GOLDEN POND
A two-ton marble picnic
table and benches sit
atop specially fortified
turf. Opposite: The
Pawsons call their
guesthouse the “wain”
after the old English
word for “wagon,”
its earlier occupant.