In the past five years, minimalism has managed to move from being an exciting concept to a dreary cliche that now seems best epitomised by a bunch of dried twigs in a glass vase.

The reality is that minimalist design cannot be understood as a collection of beeswax candles and a faux-Eames armchair. As one of the principal proponents of the movement, John Pawson, made clear from the start of his career in the early 1980s, minimalism is a reaction to an era of design in which cheap materials combined with excessive detailing to produce buildings of horrifically poor quality.

In this respect, it is the equivalent of the arts-and-crafts movement which emerged a century earlier in response to the appalling character of much Victorian architecture. As even a quick look at the portfolio of Pawson's work will show, his approach to design is not to everyone's taste - and never will be.

Minimalism demands enormous discipline and, almost without exception, is very expensive. This is why Pawson's clientele tends to be drawn from the same small group of affluent cognoscenti who can afford his work and are prepared to live in pared-back, albeit luxurious, surroundings.

He is by no means the only designer who makes such demands on anyone commissioning work from him; both the Japanese Tadao Ando and the Italian Claudio Silvestrin (the latter a former partner of Pawson) are even more uncompromising in their approach.

Despite now being the best-known representative of an architectural movement, John Pawson is not a qualified architect. After leaving school in England, he was expected to enter the family textile business but chose to spend a number of years in the 1970s in Japan, where he (briefly) considered the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk.

Monasticism and its architecture continue to be an important source of inspiration for Pawson. He often cites the 12th century Cistercian Abbey of Le Thoronet, in Provence, as being one of the world's most beautiful complexes of buildings - a number of photographs of the monastery appeared in his 1996 book Minimalism.

The ruins of Fountains Abbey, another former Cistercian settlement in Yorkshire, where he spent his childhood, also exerted a powerful allure on the young designer. And at the moment, one of the jobs on which he is working is the design of a new Cistercian monastery in the Czech Republic.

Fountains and Le Thoronet manage to be both exquisite and robust and these are the same qualities that Pawson invariably wishes to bring to his own work. He appears to be untroubled by his lack of formal qualifications (curiously, Tadao Ando is also not an architect by training).

In his early 30s, he did spend several years studying at the Architectural Association but left without taking any final exams as he had already begun to receive commissions.

This meant that, again unlike the majority of other architects, he did not spend time in an established practice but went straight into business for himself. And from the start the calibre of his commissions was exceptional. One of his first jobs, for example, was designing an apartment in central London for the writer Bruce Chatwin, followed by the design of art dealer Leslie Waddington's new gallery in the same city.

Ever since, Pawson's work has been almost evenly divided between very public and equally private commissions. Among the former are retail outlets for Calvin Klein on New York's Madison Avenue and Jigsaw on Bond Street in London.

Pawson's shops are among his least successful works, not because they are anything less than structures of great purity and simplicity but because the requirements of retail are not necessarily in sympathy with minimalism. Since this style of design appeals only to a relatively small number of individuals, its use in shops may alienate rather than entice potential consumers who are liable to feel intimidated by the space.

Perhaps the most satisfactory of all shops was the Cannelle Cakeshop in London, dating from 1988, in which the facade was a wall of opaque glass punctured at the centre by a clear glass cube just large enough to hold a single cake. Private clients, on the other hand, understand precisely what they are getting and embrace the challenges it poses them.

Among Pawson's most famous clients is the American lifestyle phenomenon Martha Stewart. For the past few years he has been working on her house in the Hamptons which was originally built by the architect Gordon Bunshaft.

Bunshaft's home owes an obvious debt to Mies van der Rohe, whose work Pawson would also hold in high esteem. Many of the Mies signature elements are therefore apparent in the Stewart property, such as the use of glass as a defining presence, the importance of siting in the landscape and the appreciation of a long, clean skyline.

These are recurring motifs in Pawson's designs too, although the building which first brought him to international attention, the Neuendorf House in Majorca, designed in 1989 in conjunction with Claudio Silvestrin, is, in its understanding of colour, light and the play of water on these two, above all an act of homage to another 20th century master, the Mexican architect Luis Barragan.

Lightness, inevitably, is one of Pawson's abiding interests, in the sense of both weightlessness and brightness. However, he is not averse to using low levels of light to create drama inside his buildings.

Most commonly, this occurs in the staircase, where the gradient of steps is relatively steep and the space between walls relatively narrow. The effect is strikingly similar to the nightstairs found in mediaeval monasteries where a flight of steps leads directly from the dormitory to the choir.

The natural materials employed for such religious buildings also find favour with Pawson. He frequently uses pale limestone in his designs, combined perhaps with oak for the stairs and whatever furniture is needed (never very much).

If furnishings - and all other forms of decoration - are spare, this is because Pawson correctly understands that good architecture needs no embellishment, that in fact the purpose of most decoration is to distract the eye from the surrounding environment's aesthetic failure.

This is why, yet again, the minimalism he practises is so demanding. It insists that nothing less than perfection in both design and execution will be satisfactory.

john pawson works by Deyan Sudjic is published by Phaidon, price £35 sterling.