Changing Rooms, Soane-style

This bland façade at 13, Lincoln’s Inn Fields hides an Aladdin’s cave of artistic quirk. It is the Sir John Soane’s Museum – a bewitching magpie’s nest cluttered with curiosities in stone, plaster and paint.
Soane, an architect best known for designing the Bank of England building, seems to have been an early DIY renovation fanatic. He began in 1792 with a single house containing living areas, a library and drawing room where he schmoozed his clients. Over the following 30 years, however, he undertook an extreme home makeover, demolishing and remodelling, gradually spreading into the two neighboring properties. His aim was to create the ideal space to display his extraordinary collection so that “amateurs and students” of architecture could appreciate and learn from the classics.
Apart from an abundance of antiquities (including a cross-eyed Hercules looking for all the world like a dim-witted quarterback), there are countless fragments of architecture: plaster casts and marble cast-offs perching and crowding every inch of space. It must be hell to dust. There is even the enormous alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, which the British Museum couldn’t afford, and had to be installed though a demolished wall. Soane threw a three-day party to celebrate its arrival.
My favourites however were the paintings: three Canalettos, glorious expanses of Venetian detail and light, and an embarrassment of Hogarths. An entire room in fact full of two Hogarth series: A Rake’s Progress and An Election. I could have stood for hours, gasping with recognition of the funny, brutal and poignant characters in these canvasses.
The star of the museum, though, is the building itself. Soane’s wonderfully modern eccentricity shines through in the way light is coaxed into every corner of the house, through glass domes and metal grilles, so that unexpected shafts illuminate even the depths of the sepulchral chamber. Here, you really do feel like you are exploring a crumbling crypt or the half-excavated streets of an ancient city.
Just as Soane, in his home-reno makeover madness, intended.