The second phase of a £7m project to restore Sir John Soane’s house in London to the state in which the English architect left it when he died is due to finish in May with the opening of his private apartments. From 19 May, visitors to the museum will able to tour (by appointment) a suite of rooms that have been closed to the public for 160 years.
The second-floor spaces were converted into offices and a curator’s flat shortly after Soane’s death in 1837. Watercolours and drawings of the interiors were used to reinstate Soane’s bedroom as well as his bathroom, complete with a fully plumbed hot-water bath (a technological marvel at the time) and an 18th-century long-case clock. The walls were stripped back to reveal the original maroon-and-yellow wallpaper, which has been preserved where possible and recreated where missing. Staff found the original order book for the pattern in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. A replica of Soane’s bed, which was sold long ago, is the only new object in the room; it is being dressed with the type of morine fabric that would originally have been used.
A photograph from 1913 was used to create replicas of the original grisaille stained-glass panels on doors leading to the room. James Wild, the museum’s curator from 1878 to 1892, moved these downstairs and they were subsequently damaged in the Second World War.
A Wedgwood urn that was decorated with pressed flowers by Soane’s wife, Eliza, will once again sit on top of a small altar in the curved oratory off the architect’s bedroom. Convex mirrors, watercolours by Turner and Clara Maria Pope’s painting The Flowers of Shakespeare (around 1835) will hang in Eliza’s morning room, down the hall from her husband’s bedchamber.
Eliza’s bedroom, which the architect used after her death in 1815 to display his sizeable collection of architectural models, is also being opened to the public. The room features a novel three-tiered shelving system, which was designed by Soane to display around 40 Italian, French and English architectural models from his 121-strong collection of 18th- and 19th-century pieces. The centrepiece of the display is a large-scale 1820s cork model of Pompeii by the famed Neapolitan model-maker Domenico Padiglione. However, Wild, whose many changes to Soane’s house are infamous, cut down the piece and threw away half of it. The museum recently called in the German model-maker Dieter Cöllen to research how Pompeii would have looked in the 1820s, so that he could recreate the model’s lost piece. “Unfortunately, a lot of our work involves undoing what Wild did in the 19th century,” says John Bridges, a curatorial assistant at the museum.
The final phase of the Opening Up the Soane project to reinstate the house’s historic interiors will focus on the catacombs in the basement and on the anteroom, as well as recovering lost spaces on the ground floor.Go on, adopt a model The Sir John Soane’s Museum, one of the world’s largest repositories of historic architectural models, is looking for people to adopt them. The pieces can be adopted for ten years for between £500 and £50,000, depending on their size and complexity. The funds will be used to provide an income for the museum. The 121-piece collection is a mixture of Italian cork models of Ancient Greek and Roman ruins, brilliant white plaster pieces of ancient structures in their original state by the French craftsman François Fouquet and wooden models of Soane’s own buildings. Around a third of the collection has already been adopted.