The living room of Tŷ Bywyd fills me with awe and terror. Awe because the room is museum-huge, with pale timber beams and a wall of windows overlooking picture-book Welsh hills, with bouncing lambs. Terror because although the furnishings are minimalist, everything – from the marble-topped coffee table to the draped-glass floor lamps – looks exquisitely breakable.
As someone who sloshes mugs of tea and spreads sticky blue ink from broken biros, I’m more than capable of doing serious damage here on my own. But I’ve got my wrecking crew with me: seven-year-old twin boys whose energetic chasing game in the last place we stayed ended with me writing a cheque to replace a shattered table.
That was a traditional holiday let: tin jugs, faux fur throws and a stack of board games. Tŷ Bywyd (it means Life House) is different. Designed by John Pawson, it is the latest building in the Living Architecture organisation, set up six years ago by philosopher Alain de Botton, as a modernist answer to the Landmark Trust.
Instead of letting lighthouses and follies, it deals in spectacular modern buildings such as the Balancing Barn in Suffolk and Grayson Perry’s gingerbread House for Essex.
A simple structure of black brick that merges into the dark trees around it, Life House is far from the flashiest of seven Living Architecture buildings around the country, but it has hidden charms. As I’m nervously clocking the nubuck leather of the elegant dining chairs, one son shouts: “Mum! Have you seen the prison?”
Let me explain. Tŷ Bywyd has two long corridors at right angles to each other, with rooms leading off. There’s that big kitchen/living room with beams, and three bedrooms, each designed for a different form of contemplation: reading, music and bathing. At the end of the darkest corridor a pair of tall wooden doors open on to a small room that’s empty but for two brick platforms and a stone set into the floor carved with this quotation from Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” High above is a skylight, so that – this being Wales – you can enjoy the sound of rain falling as you lie on your varnished brick bunk. It feels half cell, half tomb.
We soon make ourselves at home in the rest of the place, however. I lie in the bath reading a book, and listen to Kanye West’s dark twisted fantasies through massive sternum-thumping speakers. We watch an old Bond movie on a television whose picture is so pin-sharp we can count the hairs on Sean Connery’s chest. From white brick (Danish, handmade) walls to polished terrazzo (hand-poured, heated) floors, the comfortable simplicity speaks of much thought and money.
The house begins to work its magic. Removed from the messy reality of everyday life, I feel lighter, calmer. My obsessive mental inventory recedes – I know it’s vulgar to obsess over the £350 saucepans when I am meant to be contemplating Life – and I begin to relax. We take a walk up the hill opposite the house and lie in the spring sunshine, cloud spotting and watching kites circle. The boys dig holes, throw stones, and run higgledy-piggledy down tussocky slopes.
We have lunch in the friendly, faded spa town of Llandrindod Wells and are happy afterwards to swap its peeling 1950s shopfronts and steamy tearooms for our Ballardian barn. The boys play roly-poly over the modular sofa, flood the walk-in shower in their room and wonder at the number of dead flies. We buy bags of fresh, local food and cook a splendid roast (feeling slightly guilty about the lamb) in those fancy pans.
For entertainment, the last place we stayed had Mrs Brown’s Boys: the boardgame. Tŷ Bwynd has a “conversation starter”: a sheet of lightly philosophical posers designed to trigger high-toned table talk. We ask the boys if they agree with the proposition that you are a different person in different places, and which most influences their everyday mood: art, literature, music or architecture (bit of a loaded question, Alain). It beats our usual dinner-table pastime of coaxing them to finish their broccoli.
One of the main draws of Tŷ Bywyd is its lonely location. But it’s easy enough to hire bikes or make day trips into local towns. We linger in Ludlow’s extraordinary church, learning about St Laurence, who was roasted on a gridiron, and choosing our favourite carving from the medieval mermaids and owls. Another day we waste a few happy hours in Hay-on-Wye, trawling bookshops and vintage emporiums.
There’s something precious about Life House, in every sense. I can’t pretend that any of us really warm to Pawson’s mausoleum/wet room, but there is something about this architectural cross-dressing – about living, if only for a few days, in a house entirely different from your cluttered, inner-city home – that feels liberating.
On the last night, the boys pull on wellies and jumpers over their pyjamas and we head outside to see the stars. The air is clean, the sky unpolluted by orange glow. Space. That’s what Life House offers you. Space to think, to be someone different – to be the kind of person who reads Pascal and Thoreau, and doesn’t worry about how much the kettle cost.
• Accommodation was provided by Living Architecture (living-architecture.co.uk). Tŷ Bywyd sleeps six and costs from £3,200 a week
