John Pawson, choreography of the daily routine and the home environment

After a phone call, Kuramata agreed to meet Pawson, who recalls that he then “spent as much time in his company as I could.” Pawson accompanied the architect to sushi bars and other spaces that Kuramata had designed, including his home (pictures of which were also published in Domus). The influence that Kuramata had was wide ranging: “he taught me the value of discipline and hard work. What I admired most was [his] ability to take the everyday and transfigure it into something that was simultaneously new and familiar. I was also influenced by his desire to do everything—to be a sculptor and an artist.” Six years after Pawson had first arrived in Japan, he was advised by Kuramata to return to England and study at the Architectural Association in London, in order to become an architect in his own right.

Pawson’s stint at the AA was brief (he soon dropped out) but by 1981, he had completed his first project, designing a flat in a Victorian terrace house in west London. Its pared back walls and minimal interiors would mark the beginning of a design philosophy that have continued to inform Pawson’s work ever since. While the “scale and vocabulary” of his approach to design has changed over time, he says that the “underlying thinking remains the same. There is an unbroken thread running through everything I have done. It’s a meticulous process of paring away and then focusing on getting every detail of surface, proportion, junction and light right.”

In early projects such as the former Wakaba Restaurant in London (1987), the frosted glass front arches from the street front towards the interior of the space, in a manner that recalls Kuramata’s experimental approach to store design in Japan. In the early 1990s, Pawson was approached to design the now closed Calvin Klein store in New York in the building of a former bank. The bare white walls and minimal display that Pawson envisioned for the space ushered in a new approach to retail design, one that has been replicated far and wide (think, for example, of the Apple store design approach). 

But perhaps the biggest, and unexpected, project to come in the wake of Pawson’s Calvin Klein store was a commission to design the Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr, a Cistercian Monastery in the Czech Republic around the turn of the millennium. “One day out of the blue,” Pawson recalls, “somebody rang up and said, ‘We want you to design the monastery.’ I thought it was a practical joke because who gives you your ideal project?” But there was no joke to be had: the monastery had seen the Calvin Klein store in Minimum, a 1996 book by Pawson on the philosophies of a minimal design ethic, and it was something that chimed with the client.

Like the studio’s design projects, Pawson’s publishing history is rich and varied, too. He has worked on two cookbooks—the most recent of which, Home Farm Cooking (2021), was written with his wife, Catherine, and is inspired by the recipes that she makes and loves, at their converted farmhouse in Oxfordshire (designed, of course, by Pawson). Making Life Simpler, released in mid-2023, meanwhile, was written by the curator, architectural critic and museum director, Deyan Sudjic, who has been a long-time professional collaborator and friend. The premise of the book, Pawson says, was to “create a visual biography that would draw on the entirety of my life and work to date. From my point of view, every new book represents a fresh chance to communicate the work and the thinking. At the same time, each book offers an opportunity for inward assessment, appraisal and reflection.”

Asked whether he is motivated by the challenge of pushing the boundaries of what he has already accomplished, Pawson smiles and notes that “most people don’t get to design Trappist Cistercian monasteries every day.” There have been subsequent monasteries, as well as churches, including the renovation of St John at Hackney Church, “and houses, lots of houses.” But there have also been ballet sets at the Royal Opera House in London and the Opéra Bastille in Paris. “I always like to do something new if possible. It’s a much bigger learning curve,” Pawson says.

The challenge of working on something new can be evidenced at Neuendorf House in Mallorca. The project, designed between 1987–1989, was something of a blank slate, Pawson says, because it was the first house, and first architectural project, that he had worked on. Working with the Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin, the duo strove to subvert the very definition of the home. “We didn’t want to have something that was recognisable as a house in terms of the front door, like a face: the front door and then the two windows,” Pawson says. “And so, we went to a huge amount of trouble to hide the windows and have a courtyard that would allow you to enter, and then see the normal things.” But it is the exterior—high concrete walls, pink from the pigment of local soil used to complement the surrounding natural environment—that give Neuendorf House its sense of calming awe. There is little wonder that it is often featured by design websites and journals, and photographed again and again.

And yet, perhaps some of Pawson’s best-known projects have been those for which he has been his own client (many of his popular Instagram posts, for example, are shots of his home). In the 1990s, he redesigned the full interior of his London home while retaining the Victorian terraced facade. The house is oriented around space and light, with a glass window between the kitchen and garden that bridges the divide between the interior and exterior in a manner reminiscent of Mies (the kitchen worktop continues into the garden, giving the illusion of uninterrupted space).

Pawson designed his London studio around the same time in the late 1990s, and today it is surrounded by shelves that house some 6,000 books that have been acquired over the years, as well as wooden maquettes and an assemblage of Pawson’s own designs, including the bentwood Tacta Chair, that sits nearby to a Cantilever chair by Mies. Much like the latter, Pawson’s practice is all-encompassing, from architecture to furniture. In what follows, Pawson discusses the essence of his approach to design, which informs every aspect of his work.