A Supper & Talk with Berdoulat's Patrick Williams

This evening, we will be serving the book's featured recipe, known as 'The Truth' - Green Street sausage with a warm potato salad - with a glass or two of good wine.

Founder of Berdoulat, a Bath-based architectural and interior design practice with a beautiful shop on Margaret’s Buildings, Patrick Williams is known for his minute attention to detail when working with period buildings. The House Rules expresses his studio mantra: the building is the client – an approach that encourages the building to dictate what’s done to it, why and how.

Patrick's childhood was spent on a building site. He was mixing lime render aged three, and learned his trade at the coalface via purist parents (who only hung paintings with 18th century hand-forged nails). The book plots out how these early years, followed by a fine art degree, resulted in the birth of Berdoulat, now in its twentieth year.

Rather than being organised on a project-by-project basis, Andrew Montgomery's stunning images are thematically sequenced and serve to illustrate Patrick's musings on the difference between today's approach to design and manufacture, versus that found in period buildings. At times philosophical, at others technical, he focuses on how these fundamental changes in practice affect our mental health and that of the planet.

With beautiful photography from Andrew Montgomery, frequent references to food and the kitchen, a recipe and even a foreword from Nigel Slater, this is not your typical interior design book.

Patrick Williams lives in Bath, Somerset, with his wife Neri and two daughters Wren & Bonnie. He founded Berdoulat, a homewares, furniture, interiors and architectural design practice twenty years ago. It has been included in House & Garden’s Top 100 for eight years running, and his projects frequently appear in the magazine, as well as the likes of World Of Interiors, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Elle Decoration, and many newspapers globally. He is a committee member of SPAB for Bath & Bristol, and a visiting lecturer and tutor on the Interior Design course at Bath Spa University.