'It was always his fever dream... his manifesto': London’s strangest house blends art, modernity and science, and it's just thrown open its doors to visitors
The Cosmic House is a paean to American architect Charles Jencks’s belief that the universe can be made cosy.
As Milan descends on Salone del Mobile this week, yet more discerning observers will ring the doorbell at No. 19, Lansdowne Walk, for the first time in more than four months. The Cosmic House, arguably London’s most beguiling postmodern edifice — and the cosiest of its kind — reopened its gates today after a long winter hiatus. It will be available to visit until December.
The Cosmic House looks like any other house on Lansdowne Walk when viewed from the street. At the back, however, is another story.
Visits to the Cosmic House are capped at 15 guests, and number up to three a day on exceptionally busy occasions. Usually, it is less: scarcity, says the Director of the Jencks Foundation, Eszter Steierhoffer, is integral to the Cosmic House’s allure. Guests ring at the front door but enter through the former garage, accessed through a cast-iron gate and down a flight of stairs to the lower-ground floor, which is now a gallery space, currently showing a specially commissioned movie by British artist Isaac Julien. Above the projector is a half of hollow circular clay casing, with copper wires attached and sleek, horizontal brass bars emanating from its southern end and connecting to a globe.
‘It’s meant to represent the solar system,’ says Eszter, who joined the house museum in 2020. Everywhere across it are symbols and reminders of the cosmos: the spiral staircase, in which each step contains multiple indentures, begins at the bottom of the Zodiac calendar and culminates at the top, with small silver sculptures of each astrological symbol etched into every stair in order of ascendance.
The house is arranged around the motif of a subdivided square. Charles Jencks, its revolutionary architect, was working on a reedition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture — a seminal tome first published in 1970 — when he bought the house in 1978. ‘It was always his fever dream,’ says Eszter — ‘his manifesto’.
The spiral staircase at the Cosmic House articulates Charles Jencks's interest in astrology and the cosmos, unfolding much like an orrery.
Jencks never lived in the house full-time, allowing him to treat the project on more experimental terms. ‘It is a hybrid, collaborative design that embraces Classicism, the language of London commercial developers of the 1840s, Pop, Post-Modernism and modernity,’ writes Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times’s architectural critic and The Cosmic House’s ‘Keeper of Meaning’.
Jencks’s daughter, however, spent much time at the house when she was growing up, and remains heavily involved in its programs and upkeep. The Cosmic House hosts outreach programs for local school pupils as well as artistic residencies. Guests will typically stay in ‘Nan’s Room’ on the top floor, a space once occupied by the children’s au pair, which comes with its own kitchen.
The master bedroom at the Cosmic House.
The Cosmic House was once a classic double-fronted Victorian villa sitting along one of Holland Park’s most coveted residential streets. Jencks, who dedicated much of his career to landform architecture in his second wife Maggie’s native Scotland, began transforming the interiors in the late Seventies and creating the house we can visit today. Arranged over four floors, much of the furniture is cast with inscriptions that toe the line between depth and jest ('Four corners has my bed' stands out as one of the more humourous).
The garden is bedecked with 13 mirrors, one for each month of the year and an extra at the very back named ‘The Future’ — behind which, of course, there is nothing. One of the central tenets of Jencksian architecture was humour, or irony — and leaving enough room for it. By the ‘future’ portal are two wooden beams with the sayings: ‘A la recherche du temps qui vient’ (French for: ‘In search of time to come’) and ‘E arriva dal passato troppo presto’ (Italian for: ‘And it arrives from the past too soon’). The letters — etched in a typeface which Jencks developed himself, called Jencksiana — are, of course, spelt backwards.
The curtains in the sunken snug are styled as a mimicry of the Rococo style, but are actually fashioned out of a material closer to hospital screens.
The foreign languages are no surprise: before becoming an architect, Jencks trained as a linguist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a painter (his mother Ruth de Witt Pearl) and a composer and concert pianist (his father Gardner Platt Jencks), he read English Literature at Harvard before turning his attention to buildings, triggered primarily by the construction of Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
He pivoted to Harvard’s Graduate School for Design and left with a degree in architecture in 1965, moving to London to continue his studies under Reyner Banham at University College. Banham’s own supervisor when he was at the Courtauld had been none other than Pevsner.
The living room at the Cosmic House.
The Cosmic House is as much a monument to Jencks’s architectural endeavour as to his larger attempt to build a vernacular that invites the viewer to submit to a holistic vision. Upstairs, an archive of books and magazines studying his oeuvre offers viewers a closer look at the architect’s world-building. It shows how indelible language was to his understanding of form and materials: the captions for various buildings which he wrote himself talk of ‘Liberace astroturf’ and ‘fascist topiary’.
A true postmodernist, he rearranged and manipulated grammar just as he did shapes and materials: ‘Loggia modern with ungrammatical ionic,’ reads one of the captions, for a building photographed under the heading ‘Neo Class’.
A faux-atrium that doubles up as a hall of mirrors in the corner of the living room.
Further items and archival materials are hidden behind cupboards in a corner of the raised ground floor living-room arranged to resemble a kind of faux-atrium. It doubles up as a hall of mirrors. Sir John Soane, the eighteenth-century architect now regarded as Britain’s most significant, ‘was a major point of reference for Charles,’ says Eszter. At his house museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the breakfast room houses no fewer than 100 mirrors across beams, columns and vaults, refracting the sunlight across all corners of the room at all hours of the day. A similar interplay of light and refractions takes place here, where a sunken snug overlooking the south-facing garden allows the light to seep further into the principal floor, which beams it all over the place thanks to mirrored, horn-like sculptures.
If the Cosmic House is an interiors-led manifesto for postmodern living, it also offers the contemporary designer smart ideas on how to blend old and new, reflect the times we live in and let the light in, all at once. As for the horticultural apotheosis of Jencks’s oeuvre, one need only head to Portrack House in Dumfriesshire, where his 12-hectare Garden of Cosmic Speculation gives the natural landscape a similarly bold treatment. It's enough to make any student of the English narrative garden leap out of their own skin and would certainly cause Capability Brown to roll over in his grave. But it is a paean to the architect's love of modernity and science, and to a cohesive, all-encompassing vision that understands man's place in the universe on a subtle and material level.
A shorter version of this feature appears in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
