The newly opened private quarters of one of Britain’s most original architects reveal morbid passions alongside the marvels
The house and museum created by Sir John Soane in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London is a universe whose contents approach the infinite. Loaded with the antiquities and artworks acquired by the great architect, both real and plaster-casts, its perspectives are then multiplied by mirrors and layers of space: a display case, as it might be, in a niche in a vestibule beyond a room reached from an ante-room framed by an arch. The exterior is largely screened off, a distant memory, or experienced through filtered and indirect light. The experience is of an internal world of unknown boundaries.
Should there be any danger of knowing it all, wormholes then open up into unsuspected galaxies, as previously inaccessible spaces are brought back to life by its ongoing restoration programme. The latest of these also gives a view into Soane’s bizarre mind. Ostensibly the top floor apartment for Soane and his wife, Eliza, it is also a shrine, a statement of architectural history, a bit of a Pharaonic tomb.
It is not recorded what the architect did for personal hygiene once he had made his bathtub into a Canopic jar
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