Minimalism

It’s not easy finding the doorbell on John Pawson’s front door. It’s a tiny stainless steel button, completely flush and with no surround, set into the wall reveal beside the door. But when I find it, Pawson’s wife Catherine comes up, effusively apologising for not having tidied up. When we get downstairs to the kitchen, I can’t see a thing out of place other than one tea cup by the sink and that’s dealt with in a flash. That’s it. That’s what passes for mess in the Pawson household.
The interior itself is ever so slightly strange. Strange not of itself – it is, of course, luminously elegant, but because, although I’ve never been here, it is disquietingly familiar. Completed a little more than a decade ago, Pawson’s house, in a quietly expensive west London street, became the symbol of minimalism, for the kind of half-modernist, half-Zen stripping back of stuff that was touted as setting the scene for the new millennium. It was the architecture of the art gallery, calm, pale, allowing the art to glow, the architecture of a confident age in which a lack of possessions on show was a sign of status.

Sure enough, there at the bottom of the stairs is a Carl Andre sculpture, two rows of solid copper cubes. A Picasso engraving hangs subtly in the bathroom. It is undeniably seductive and, far from having passed out of fashion as has been endlessly predicted, minimalism has become a vehicle employed occasionally by almost every architect from Los Angeles via Switzerland to China, an indispensable effect that exudes the luxury of being able to live simply. Quite how Pawson’s idea of architecture has not just survived but thrived is demonstrated by a major exhibition of his work at London’s Design Museum, the institution he himself will be redesigning when it moves to inhabit the strange concrete shell of the former Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, a short stroll through Holland Park from his own house.
The exhibition will feature something unusual, a specially commissioned architectural space, a Pawson room that can be experienced at full size. Exhibits will be on long, Pawson-designed benches alongside personal effects including correspondence with the writer Bruce Chatwin.
Pawson himself is relaxed and charming; in light chinos and a crisp shirt he looks a little anachronistic, like a character from Brideshead Revisited. He doesn’t talk like an architect. He uses words such as “enjoyment”, talks of “being a good neighbour” and of wanting to make the Design Museum “a place to take the kids for a cracking day out”. His 1996 book, Minimum, became that rarest of things, an architectural bestseller and was followed up by a cookbook, Living and Eating, which photographed mostly Mediterranean foods against the backdrop of that house.

Calvin Klein’s flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York

Where, I wondered, did this almost obsessive tendency to the minimal come from? “At one point”, Pawson tells me, sitting at his very familiar long dining table, “I thought I was going to be a Buddhist monk and just meditate. I went to a monastery in Japan. I lasted one night.”
Nevertheless, Pawson stayed in Japan and, rather than returning to his father’s textile firm in Halifax, in the north of England (“I wasn’t a huge success in the business – I took the hint and went as far away as possible”), he came back to London to study architecture. “I didn’t have the patience to stick at it though, couldn’t cope with student life and I started taking commissions before I’d finished the course.”
In his own way, Pawson has managed to atone for his failure in the monastery. His finest building is the ethereal Novy Dvur Trappist Monastery in the Czech Republic, which manages to blend the solidity and timelessness of medieval Cistercian architecture with a stripped-down modernism. There is a story that some monks had seen Pawson’s minimal chic Calvin Klein store on New York’s Madison Avenue and were inspired to ask him to build the new monastery. I had an absurd picture in my head of monks wandering the underpants aisles thinking, “This is what we need” – but of course that wasn’t what happened. These most dedicated of monks don’t venture outside the walls of their own monastery, so although they did come across the Calvin Klein store (which was completed in 1995), it was in a magazine. “These monks are highly educated,” Pawson says. “Most of them come to the order after studying at university and they’re sophisticated enough to see through the stuff and just see a beautiful space. Instead of seeing sweaters, they could see altars.”

Monastery at Novy Dvur, Czech Republic

It is a huge step though, isn’t it – from minimalism as fashion statement to minimalism as a spiritual existence? “Well,” Pawson pauses, “I was always aware that, for a minimalist, a monastery is the perfect commission. And I have to say that since Novy Dvur was completed, it has been a good calling card.”
There was a reaction to minimalism as a style that allows the affluent to bask in the aesthetic asceticism of humility, the appearance of the transcendence of stuff. Pawson is sanguine about the implications. “Minimalism is about clarity, about getting things right and not having anything you don’t need. But it’s also about creating a plain space, which is simply good to be in. The monks have a head-start because they have their rules, laid down by St Benedict, and they have the texts, guidelines for how to live. They have no possessions at all, just a small box. Yet they have more space in their monastery than we do in our houses.” In a manner, that is the essence, that space is itself a luxury, one perhaps poorly appreciated. Pawson is now carrying out work at the Benedictine mother monastery in Burgundy as well as another monastery in Hungary and at a church in Augsburg, southern Germany.
He is also known for his product design, which, like his architecture, is clear and elegant. I ask about the differences between designing a building and a saucepan. “They’re not that different,” he says. “I like to design things for the architecture, for space. You’re obviously not constrained by a site when you design products but they tend to be geometric forms, so you have limits. The best thing is that you can keep prototyping until you have got it perfect. Houses just aren’t like that.”
For his own house, though, he did experiment. “I drove Catherine mad because I wanted to design everything – taps, handles, hinges. I wanted to experiment in a way you can’t when you’re designing for a client. The house became an obsession. I am an imperfect perfectionist, I love things done properly but I’m not always good at doing them.”
I can’t resist asking about his house. Is Pawson’s wife, I wonder, a minimalist? “No” is the firm, slightly too quick answer. “But she has grown to see the benefits.” I later check this answer with Catherine herself and note not a trace of neurosis when she replies: “I actually love living without too much stuff. It’s a relief.”
As I leave I can’t help but notice a pair of trainers left by the front door. The Pawsons’ teenage son is back from college. They suddenly take on the air of an artwork, an intervention, an installation. Minimalism is, it appears, an ongoing struggle, even in the Pawson household.

‘John Pawson: Plain Space’, Design Museum, London, September 22-January 30 2011. www.designmuseum.org