The Holland Park home of the late architectural historian, landscape designer and all-around intellectual Charles Jencks will launch as a museum and reading room on 24 September.
Jencks and his wife Maggie Keswick Jencks purchased the Victorian villa in 1978 and collaborated with architect Terry Farrell on its transformation into a postmodern monument. Inside, they commissioned designers like Michael Graves, Piers Gough and Eduardo Paolozzi to create an atmosphere that would spur critical thought and debate. The designers put their hands to lighting, fireplaces, mosaics and a jacuzzi adapted from a Borromini dome.
The Garden facade with a representation of the family of four through the repeated ‘Jencksiana’ motif. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Architectural Library is entered from the Solar Stair. Here you can see the radial structure of the library roof expressed as sun rays. Cut outs around the stair resemble a surprised face, with a pealing back of the layers of construction, a Post-Modern play on the Modernist desire of truth to materials. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The new Exhibition Room with the evolution of scientific representations of the sun in the ceiling lights, looking out to the Time Garden, with a malachite floor and sculpture by Charles and Lily Jencks of the sun and earth above. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Solar Stair spirals through the centre of the building with the main rooms accessed at different levels. As a central organising devise the stair encourages a sense of rotation around the building, and allows glimpses into different rooms; here the architectural library is seen with a view cut down into the kitchen. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Dome of Water is a jacuzzi designed by Piers Gough, adapted and inverted from dome by Borromini. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Cosmic Oval at the entrance sets up the major and minor themes that visitors will find throughout the house. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Architectural Library with the slide-scraper in the foreground, an ad-hoc combination of off the shelf filing cabinets with added MDF ornamentation. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Solar Stair is a cantilever concrete spiral with Eduardo Paolozzi’s Black Hole mosaic at the base. Photography: ©Sue Barr
The Jenckses called it Thematic House, later changing the name to Cosmo House. When it opens to the public, it will be the UK’s only Grade I-listed postwar property.
The house opens onto an oval foyer surrounded by mirrored doorways and a painted frieze by William Stok. Four main-floor rooms represent the seasons, and the spiral staircase has 52 steps for each week of the year.
A new gallery displays a hand-painted globe and a green floor lacquered to resemble malachite, a nod to Jencks’ interest in cosmology. Pierre Beaudry, the trompe l’oeil master who worked on the original home, oversaw the restoration.
Maggie passed away in 1995 from cancer, after helping to envisage the serene, community-minded refuges that would become Maggie’s Centres, of which there are 27 in the UK. Jencks himself died in 2019.
During their marriage, they amassed an extensive library and architectural archive, which will be available to visitors.
