Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London
Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0

The architect John Soane turned three terraced houses into his home, his office and a museum for his collections. The rooms are full of ancient fragments, paintings and casts, and light falls in from hidden skylights. Everything remains as it was when he died.

John Soane was architect to the Bank of England and professor of architecture at the Royal Academy. In 1792 he bought number 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and rebuilt it. He later also bought the neighbouring number 13 and in 1823–1824 rebuilt number 14. The houses became his home, his drawing office and a school for his pupils. He collected ancient fragments, casts, architectural models, books and paintings. Through an Act of Parliament in 1833 he ensured that after his death the house would be preserved as a museum and left as he had arranged it.

Soane worked with light as a material. Skylights, lanterns and coloured glass bring daylight in at unexpected places, and mirrors in walls and ceilings multiply the rooms. In the Breakfast Room a low domed ceiling hangs like a canopy, with light falling down around its edges. The Picture Room is small but holds many paintings on walls that can be folded out, among them William Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress. In the basement stands the sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I, which Soane bought in 1824. The façade has a loggia of Portland stone that projects from the ordinary brick houses.

Soane died in 1837, and the museum has been open to the public ever since. It has been carefully restored, and rooms altered after his death have been reinstated. His Bank of England was largely demolished in the 1920s, so the house is the best place to experience his personal classicism. Soane influenced 20th-century architects through his way of simplifying classical forms and working with light, and he has been called a forerunner of modernism.