Good Ordinary

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

Nineteenth-century oak chairs march down the long sides of Ben Pentreath and Charlie McCormick’s mahogany dining table of the same period at their Dorset house, known as the Old Parsonage. An Oisin Byrne painting from his ongoing Cut Flowers series is displayed above a c. 1740 chimneypiece, flanked by Piranesi engravings. In collaboration with Morris & Co., Pentreath has recolored a number of William Morris wallpapers, including Willow Boughs seen here. All photographs are by Ben Pentreath, courtesy of Little Bird Publicity.

This month, Ben Pentreath releases a must-have Rizzoli book called An English Vision: Traditional Architecture and Decoration for Today.  ANTIQUES was captivated by its record of spirited residences, lensed by the man himself, who turns out to be a fine self-taught photographer. But as the pages turned, we realized that despite the award-winning Pentreath’s popularity on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—including his neo-traditionalist work for Charles III’s Poundbury housing estate in Dorset and the Earl of Moray’s Tornagrain town in Scotland—we’d never heard him address the soul-satisfying brown furniture that anchors the circa-1820 former parsonage that has been long leased by him and his husband, floral designer, gardener, and plantsman Charlie McCormick. Curiosity piqued, ANTIQUES dialed, Pentreath answered, and what followed was a lively, informative, and opinionated hour-plus chat (edited for space) about the largely anonymous venerables the couple cannot live without.

Ben Pentreath: When I moved into the Old Parsonage, I needed a kitchen dresser, and I spent a lot of time hurtling around on eBay. Now, the website is clogged up with trainers, but fifteen to twenty years ago, it was mainly antiques. It was one of the first big portals for antiques dealers to sell on, long before 1stDibs.com. If you typed in “antique Georgian dresser,” there was lots of availability. I just thought about size, practicality, and what I wanted to store in it. I bought the dresser for £800; it’s special but nothing special and basically perfect. Except for that piece, I’m never quite buying things for a spot. Obviously, yes, I need a table here or there, but most of the time, I’m just keeping my eyes open and seeing something I really like.

The Magazine ANTIQUES: Now that eBay offers far less tempting furnishings, where do you look?

BP: In my childhood, from say ages eight to eleven, I was always redecorating my bedroom, hoovering up the nicest bits of furniture at home that my parents would allow me to have. At university, it was all about little junk shops. I used to go a lot to Christie’s South Kensington, which closed in 2017, and today you can always find good old bits of furniture at slightly junky, never fancy local auctions.

TMA: Antiques have been a leitmotif in your interiors, both personal ones and those for clients, for decades. What accounts for that attraction, aside from the fact that many of your clients live in historic properties?

BP: Antiques have been part of my life since day one. I can’t really say why. We’re just interested in history, aren’t we? Old things are a connection to history and time, so collecting antiques is a form of time travel; they’re time-travel devices. In one room or one shop, you can just bounce around the centuries. People always bang on about antiques being cheaper and more sustainable, and there’s always the constant stream of articles about the supposedly imminent revival of brown furniture. All of which is true, but for me, the money does come into it.

It just wouldn’t occur to me to make something new or buy something new if you could get something old, that’s more beautiful, with more meaning, for far less than something that was manufactured this week. Unless you’re getting something top notch by a Georgian cabinetmaker, of course, but I’ve no interest in that. I’m not really into collecting things that are valuable. I don’t have expensive taste in decoration. There are certain people who really, from a young age, want to own the very best stuff, but, actually, I’m a bit terrified if I happen to have something really valuable around.

TMA: Tell us about the antiques that you call “good ordinary.”

BP: “Good ordinary” is a phrase that’s used in architecture for buildings that are simple and serve their purpose, handsomely but modestly. When it comes to furniture, I’m always interested in good ordinary stuff. It can’t be too fancy to actually use. That’s my one rule for everyone: just do not have anything in your house, antique wise, that would make you nervous if a glass of wine spills on it. It just feels unrelaxed. I remember going to a house where the dining room had eight or ten school of Chippendale dining chairs, really beautiful, that should have been in a museum. There was a crazy lot of chitchat and booze that night, and though I didn’t even lean back on my chair—I only sat back in the seat—I heard one of the legs crack. I thought, Oh, God, I’m just going to sit so still for the next few hours. That was quite stressful.

Pentreath’s first purchase for the Old Parsonage was an eighteenth-century English oak dresser, which he found on eBay in the 1990s. It now anchors a wall of the gloss-yellow kitchen. At left is another eighteenth-century find, a rather broad oak gentleman’s armchair; above it hangs a 1920s photograph of a country wedding, a gift from Soane Britain co-founder Lulu Lytle upon the occasion of Pentreath and McCormick’s own nuptials.

TMA: Are you still buying for the Old Parsonage or your London apartment?

BP: Charlie’s and my antiques buying habits have been diminishing a bit. We’ve run out of space. In Dorset, almost all the furniture—with the exception of the beds and the yellow sofa in the drawing room, which we got from dealer-decorator Max Rollitt—is antique. I can’t think of anything in the whole house that isn’t antique. Well, there is one Wishbone chair by Carl Hansen in the kitchen, and a couple of Eero Saarinen’s little Tulip tables in the drawing room. But those are literally the only things in the house that aren’t antiques. We’re not slavish about buying into a particular period. It’s all a bit of a mishmash, from early Georgian to arts and crafts to Edwardiana. We do have a bit more twentieth-century furniture at our flat in London, but to be fair, that place has another kind of energy, so we wanted to emphasize that difference.

TMA: Tell me about your grandmother, because she had a huge influence on the furnishings of your childhood and what you live with today.

Pentreath in his London office. Photograph by Simon Bevan.

BP: My granny, my dad’s mum, had an early love of antiques, so they were always in our family. She and my Anglican clergyman grandfather, a headmaster of a school in Australia, had to leave Australia and return to England during World War II because he was taking up a new post in Shropshire. They arrived back in England on a ship in 1943; can you imagine? The war was going on. Then they had to take a dangerous convoy journey to Liverpool, which had been bombed out, and had to move into a big old house, the headmaster’s house, that didn’t have a stick of furniture. She did exactly what Charlie and I are still doing now, buying lots of really good anonymous things at little local auctions. At that moment, a lot of people were getting rid of stuff, and in the immediate postwar period, a lot of big country houses were clearing out. My granny wasn’t buying huge pieces of Chippendale, though that would have been nice. What she collected ended up with my parents, and when my parents died, my brothers and I divvied up stuff, and some of it came in our direction. All the china in the dining room is from my granny, from that same era. There are tureens, too, from a huge service, and the plate rack over the tub in one of the bathrooms.

TMA: But the Old Parsonage doesn’t feel old-fashioned, despite the predominance of furniture, some of which is three centuries old.

BP: The funny thing is that for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel too fuddy-duddy. It doesn’t feel like a museum or like you’re walking into a historic house in Charleston. It’s got a different energy. What’s that coming from? I can’t work it out. Maybe here and there it’s the choices of paint colors and fabrics. Our pictures are slightly more contemporary, just barely. Maybe that

keeps it a tiny bit fresher. Maybe it’s the Morris and Company wallpapers and the bright yellow gloss paint, which just turns up the dial. We did not self-consciously create something that felt fresh. There’s a certain school of decorating with antiques where it looks as if you’re trying to live in the eighteenth century. We’re not. That being said, almost everything we’ve got is old but it doesn’t feel that old. The pictures and lots of books and modern photography—it’s not a look self-consciously preserved in aspic. And it’s not a “Hello, I’m an antiques dealer” interior.

The drawing room, washed with custom-made Parsonage Pink by Papers and Paint, contains one of the few non-antiques owned by Pentreath and McCormick: a yellow-up-holstered sofa by Max Rollitt, where the couple’s Corgi, Enid, keeps a watchful eye. The blue-and-white table lamp is a converted nineteenth-century Delft vase, the cane arm-chair is Regency, and the Regency-style chimneypiece is from Jamb, and is surmounted by antique Staffordshire spaniels. Happily they’re still a paired set—a pack of the animals that Pentreath describes as “ones we’ve found that don’t have their mates anymore” are relegated to a space above a tall cupboard in the guest bedroom.

TMA: Though much of what furnishes your rooms is what you categorize as “good ordinary,” are there standout pieces in your opinion?

On a windowsill on a landing, Pentreath has gathered an assortment of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century glasses, decanters, and other vessels.

BP: The dining chairs are slightly Augustus Pugin-y, but they’re not actually Pugin. They’re late nineteenth century, high Victorian, and have a slightly religious feeling, as if they were made for a cleric. Their energy is very Christian, and very simple, almost weirdly contemporary. The simplicity of them is unusual for a Victorian chair. The sideboard in the dining room came from a junk shop in Islington, in London, and is William IV; that’s pretty nice, actually.

TMA: Anything else?

BP: The chair to the left of the kitchen dresser was found in Islington, too, at a weekly junk auction. It’s quite unusual, a Georgian country chair that was made for a larger gentleman. When antiques friends, like Molly Alexander of Jamb, come to visit, they all lose their marbles over it. I can’t stop buying chairs. There must be hundreds of them. One day they’ll find a home somewhere.

TMA: Which leads us, naturally, to the Orkney Islands.

BP: Charlie and I are moving there in October, giving up the Old Parsonage for Westness House, a circa-1750 Georgian house set within a ten-acre walled garden. It’s a most special situation by the sea, on a remote island in the archipelago. It’s a two-hour flight to Orkney from London. Then you take a little ferry for twenty-five minutes to get to our island, then drive down the road for five minutes to get to the house. Morris and Company were involved with it, and William Morris stayed there loads in the 1890s. One of the rooms has fragments of an original Morris wallpaper, and of the fifteen fireplaces, all but one have tiles by William De Morgan. It’s kind of crazy. It was owned by a ninety-year-old lady. She liked us and sold it to us on a handshake. All the furniture from the Old Parsonage is going to fit perfectly.

Another of Pentreath’s recolored William Morris wallpapers for Morris & Co., here Poppy, lines the guest bedroom. Hone plaster objects fill the grate, framed by the house’s original nineteenth-century chimneypiece, and unpaired Staffordshire spaniels are atop the cabinet at left.
A rosy needlepoint by fashion designer and hotelier Jasper Conran is mounted above the headboard in the primary bedroom. The bedside tables are nineteenth-century English, the cabinet with drawers dates from a century later, and to the left of the headboard is a photograph of Pentreath’s collector grandmother. The coverlet is made from Cowtan and Tout’s Bailey Rose glazed cotton.

TMA: Any words of wisdom for anyone interested in antiques but who hasn’t yet taken the plunge?

BP: Going around a dusty shop or not-nice auction that’s even dustier can suck the energy out of anyone. But look beyond that. Is that piece of furniture speaking to you? Is it talking to you, and are you talking back? If so, go for it. Living with antiques is a question of having confidence—you can live with them but also you have to take charge of them.

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