Halloween architecture: John Pawson’s Life House as the nexus of modern cinematic dread

John Pawson’s Tŷ Bywyd, or ‘Life House’, is a secluded Welsh retreat designed and built for Living Architecture. Remote, refined and ascetically designed and furnished for a short spell of restorative contemplation, it is the ultimate aspirational modern escape. 

Life House: a contemporary 'contemplation space'

As well as a dedicated ‘contemplation space’, Living Architecture notes that the Life House’s ‘bedrooms have been carefully designed to promote a sense of relaxation and immersion in life’s true pleasures,’ with especially curated libraries of books and music, along with a bathtub overlooking the wild Welsh landscape. Opened in 2016, it is a popular destination in the organisation’s portfolio of seven spectacular architect-design houses.

Yet the Life House also has a sinister side. The project has featured as a crucial backdrop to not one, but two contemporary horror films, You Should Have Left (2020) and The Feast (2021). In each film, the location and the architecture itself – especially in You Should Have Left – is a rich source of the dread and danger that a classic a haunted house movie brings to a location. 

Homes in 'Halloween architecture'

The haunted house trope is as old as houses themselves, giving writers and directors free reign to explore the myriad ways in which architectural space can be made to unsettle and scare. The stereotypical haunted house is all cobweb-covered passages, gloomy corners, dark basements, dusty attics and locked doors. 

Even when films used explicitly modern buildings - like William Castle’s classic Vincent Price-led House on Haunted Hill (1959) – interiors still defaulted to the spider-infested dread of traditional Victoriana, rather than the striking concrete block walls that actually defined Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, inside and out.

From The Haunting (1963), through to The Amityville Horror (1979), What Lies Beneath (2000), The Others (2001) and even Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), each generation has managed its own twist on Halloween architecture, with the house usually playing centre stage, an uncredited character in the drama.

That’s very much the case in the first film to infuse a phantom menace into Pawson’s tasteful rural idyll. In David Koepp’s You Should Have Left (2000), starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried, the house is the stage for a psychological unravelling, its very fabric seeming to change and alter around the characters. Koepp (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Kehlmann), takes the liberty of digitally extending Pawson’s design, adding an additional floor, whilst also playing around with the internal volumes and reflections as part of the plot. There are allusions to Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult 2000 novel, House of Leaves, which plays similarly twisted games with time and space.

In The Feast, a 2021 Welsh language film directed by Lee Haven Jones, the Life House plays a more subdued background role. The dark tale of a dinner party spinning out of control via an unhinged descent into folk horror. Pawson’s refined and neutral palette and meticulous attention to detail is a distractingly neutral backdrop to a Grand Guignol climax, made all the more unsettling by its incursion into this tasteful realm.

What brings filmmakers to the Life House? Practicalities like the aesthetic solitude and ample space for filming were no doubt high in location managers’ minds (although You Should Have Left used a studio set as well as on location filming). As the scale, detail and atmosphere of traditional architecture retreats ever further into the past, we can expect writers and directors to eke more and more horror out of the modernist present. 

The Life House can be booked for (hopefully) peaceful stays at Living-Architecture.co.uk