3 min readFor House Beautiful’s 130th anniversary this year, we're digging into some of our favorite articles from our archive —from celebrity home tours (including Farrah Fawcett , Bette Midler, and more) to decades-old design inspiration that still holds up today. Stay tuned for more archive deep dives throughout 2026, and sign up for our newsletter to get the very best delivered to your inbox every month.
John Pawson, the famously minimalistic British architect, established his practice in 1981 after graduating from Eton and spending an influential tenure in Japan. He became better-known stateside upon his completion of the Calvin Klein Collections store, which opened in Manhattan in 1995—a monumental space with 3-story glass walls and benches that appeared to float above the floor. His style, at once spare and full of feeling, had an enormous impact on the fashions and interiors of the time. He also designed homes, but how does one live in such a pared-down interior, especially with children? Read on to take a tour of the house that Pawson created for his own family in London, featured in House Beautiful's June 2000 issue.
By Susan Zevon
For his 1996 book Minimum, a largely visual essay, British architect John Pawson gathered together more than a hundred beautiful photographs of a row of Mexican grain silos, a Shaker staircase, and a Chinese bowl to prove that simplicity is a "virtue that can purify the spirit, and can offer inner tranquillity." A dynamic three-dimensional argument for his case is the home in London that he shares with his wife and two school-age sons.
Those who have seen Pawson's fastidiously detailed, bare-bones Calvin Klein store in Manhattan might wonder about daily life in such pared-down surroundings. The trick seems to be excellent storage and resourceful family members. "The boys find the house ideal for riding bikes indoors, there is no furniture to bump into," says Catherine Pawson, an interior designer trained at Colefax & Fowler who favors the cozy, cluttered English country-house style.
When John Pawson was unable to find a London site on which to build the quintessentially minimalist residence he wanted, his wife found them a 19th-century terrace house (what Americans call a row house) in Notting Hill. No different from thousands of others built in that city at a time when families were large and servants plentiful, it contained four levels of mostly tiny, dark rooms. But Mrs. Pawson liked the private communal gardens in back, a safe place for the children to play, and her husband was delighted with the building's condition: "It was in such a derelict state that we could without guilt rip everything out."
He left the Victorian facade intact (as required by local ordinance) but gutted the interiors, including an L-shaped staircase that squandered nearly a quarter of the 1,850-square-foot interior. Now, a straight flight of steps climbs up the left side of the house. Avant-garde and largely unwalled though they may now be, spaces are allotted traditionally. The living area occupies the main floor, with the kitchen and dining at the garden level; the boys get the top floor, and their parents' suite is right below them.
From the front door, you see a vista the length of the interior lit by a 20-foot ceiling slot and open through new glass doors to the garden. "The house is so bathed in light, it makes me feel like I'm on holiday," says the agreeable Catherine Pawson. She admits to missing a deep, pillow-strewn sofa, but says, "I'm so busy keeping the place bare I don't have time to sit around."
Outdoors
Kitchen
Living Room
Primary Suite
Primary Bathroom
Child's Bedroom
