ALTHOUGH IT IS NEAR where we live, I had never heard of the Cosmic House at 19 Lansdowne Walk near Holland Park. Recently, our daughter went to a special event there and was so impressed by the place that she very kindly gave me admission tickets for my Father’s Day gift.

Cosmic House, initially called ‘Thematic House’, was designed by the American born writer, theorist, and architect Charles Jencks (1939-2019). It is a heavily modified building first erected in the early 1840s. Jencks purchased it in 1978 and had completed most of its many dramatic alterations by 1983. It is a song of praise to Post Modernism. Because Jencks was fascinated by cosmology, the house’s various rooms and other spaces have been designed with cosmological ideas in mind. For me, the most exciting element of this house is the spiral staircase from which all the rooms on various levels can be accessed. Each room contains a riot of decorative motifs. Jencks let his imagination run wild. Some of the rooms, such as the library and the jacuzzi area (inspired by a dome designed by Borromini), are extremely effective. Some of the other rooms, are, as Jencks can be heard admitting in a film we were shown, a bit ‘over the top’.

The shapes of the rooms and the various spaces in Cosmic House show that Jencks was a great architect. However, I felt that they were somewhat disguised by the flamboyant interior décor, which was designed mainly by Jencks. With natural light accessing the building in many ingenious ways and the profusion of objets d’art in many of the rooms, we were reminded a bit of the ‘atmosphere’ of the Sir John Soane Museum in London’s Lincolns Inn Fields.

As a Father’s Day gift, a visit to Cosmic House was certainly original. It is a place worth visiting, possibly on the same day as a visit to another highly original edifice nearby – Leighton House.