Every reign has its style. Houses built in the first Elizabethan age can be recognised by their curved gables, mullioned windows, parapets and chimney stacks, while inside surviving examples we find moulded plaster ceilings with Gothic fan vaulting and majestic fireplaces replete with ornament. The Georgian period, which spans more than century because the first four monarchs of the house of Hanover were all called George, is marked by symmetry and proportion, based on the classical architecture of Greece and Rome. The second Elizabethan age coincided with mid-century Modernism, as well as a certain restraint born of war time thriftiness; at Balmoral, the late Queen Elizabeth II patched up damage to the walls with wallpaper bought by Queen Victoria, while Tina Brown reported that a Christmas table at Sandringham was “bare, with no cloth and poinsettia placed in the middle.”
It all rather leads us to ask ourselves what might we expect, aesthetically, in the years to come? Might the recent re-interest in elaborate tablescaping be a trickle-down from His Majesty’s grand dinner parties at Highgrove? Or is the increase in the installation of outdoor compost loos – which are suddenly popping up everywhere from hipster rooftop bars in Peckham to gardens in the South Downs – a Carolean-era and King Charles-influenced craze?
Firstly, let’s look back. Growing up, King Charles had a close relationship with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, wife of King George VI, and she tended towards grandeur, having lived through the age of Edwardian splendour. Two cherubs on her four-poster bed at Clarence House had their angel’s clothes washed and starched monthly. So it only follows that the King put to use the things he found in the vaults of St. James’s Palace – plates, candlesticks and napkins given to the monarch over the centuries, dating back to Catherine the Great, thus resurrecting both the idea of making a serious effort when entertaining even privately (we all know what a state banquet look like) and using antiques.
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The King was matched in his enthusiasm for the latter by the late Robert Kime, his preferred decorator, who de-chintzed Highgrove in the 1980s, and then re-decorated Clarence House for Prince Charles, the then Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Harry in 2002. In doing so he created some of the most beautiful rooms in Britain; for those of us not fortunate enough to have experienced them in real life, we’ve at least seen images – and thus all identified the first royal interior we’ve genuinely wanted to inhabit (the late Queen’s having been just a tiny bit too rationing-chic). But that’s the magic of Kime, and his passion for near Eastern textiles, Turkish rugs, and layering of beautiful, old and curious endures, and is emulated far beyond palaces. Would his influence have been so great even without regal association? We like to think so–though Kime did imply that his most famous client furthered the reach of his eye. When speaking about his work at Highgrove, he recalled the Prince regularly popping in whereupon “he would find three things wrong and he’d always be right. They were things I hadn’t thought about long enough.”
Highgrove was also where our King showed himself as being impressively ahead of his time. During Kime’s overhaul he had the house kitted out with solar panels and a natural sewage system. To reiterate, this was the 1980s, i.e. long before the majority of us were giving any thought to alternative energy means, heat pumps, or even, if we’re honest, giving much consideration to the environment, at all. Similarly, the King has been vocal in his support for organic farming, the prevention of climate change, homeopathy and alternative medicine (he practices intermittent fasting, via forgoing lunch.) Pulling together all these threads is his forty-year tenure as - in the words of the New York Times - “the most prominent architecture critic in the world.”
Back in 1984, the then Prince of Wales gave an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects on the occasion of RIBA’s 150th birthday. He suggested that the audience were “ignoring the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country,” and famously described a proposed glass and steel extension to the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” The project was summarily nixed (well, planning permission was refused) and instead we have the post-modernist Sainsbury Wing, designed by Robert Venturi to work with its classical neighbour rather than against it. Similarly, plans for a City tower block by Mies van der Rohe were jettisoned, as were Richard Rogers’s design for Chelsea Barracks. There was a time when Prince Charles was accused of meddling, of being against progress. But if you read the speech in full today, you might marvel as just how much of what he said has become the basis of contemporary architectural practice. He argued for visual beauty as well as social use, better accessibility for the disabled, the rehabilitation of existing buildings, the importance of community consultation, and the necessity of restoring historic street patterns.
And it wasn’t a one off–so enthusiastic is our King when it comes to architecture that, in 1986, he created the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, to teach “the spiritual harmony of classical form”, and in 1994 launched his own magazine on the topic, Perspectives. Sadly, the magazine only ran for four years, but the Institute has morphed and expanded into The Prince’s Foundation, which, though now less focussed on architecture, teaches traditional crafts, and best sustainable practice in construction. And what’s more is that our King has somewhat learnt more about both on the job, via Poundbury, the traditionalist model village in Dorchester dreamed up by the King and the architect Leon Krier at the end of the 1980s, now close to completion.
Ben Pentreath has been working on the Poundbury development for almost 20 years and his involvement started when he was a student at the previously mentioned Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture. “If you look at a typical 1989 suburban development, it’s all identical two-storey brick houses, with a business park on the edge if you’re lucky,” he says. “Here, you’ll find a terrace of social housing opposite a big private house designed by the same architect, and sense of genuine civic life.” Some adhere to Georgian proportion, others to Arts & Crafts, and alongside the homes there are medical clinics and vets, offices of lawyers and accountants, travel agents and funeral home, a thriving chocolate and cereal factory, and, among the porticos, 80 small units for start-up businesses. True, the architecture is not cutting-edge, but unlike the original Georgian or Arts & Crafts houses, those built at Poundbury are energy efficient – which is exactly what we need. And arguably, the British public prefer a revivalist style to anything too up to the minute. A recent Savills survey found that house prices in Poundbury are up to 29% higher than other new-build schemes in the same area.
And it is here, in the new-builds, and his passion for upholding the tenets of good architecture and traditional craft while protecting the environment, that the reign of King Charles will perhaps be most felt. Certainly, Poundbury has proved an influence on other Ben Pentreath & Associates projects, namely Tornagrain in the Scottish Highlands, the Truro Eastern District, and Sulis Down in Bath–and it would be nice to think it is food for thought for other urban planning developers, especially bearing in mind the housing crisis (not to mention the climate crisis). Failing that, in 2016 Leon Krier told the Guardian that his and the Prince of Wales’s plans extended beyond Poundbury: “We are going to build a small modernist town and show them how to do it.” Can he still, now he’s King? Watch this space.
