Architects’ Own Houses

Thomas Jefferson, an American aristocrat, diplomat and president, was the architect of a single building on which he worked throughout his life. The house was his Virginia mansion, the famed Monticello. While the look of the plantation villa was traditional, its technological side was revolutionary. The many engineering novelties included a flush toilet, dumb-waiter, a letter-copying device (a muscle-powered Xerox machine) and much else. This was, in short, the prototypical home of a mad scientist. One can imagine Jefferson torturing James Bond in one of the mansion’s great cellar spaces. Architects’ own homes, especially in the 20th century, have been laboratories of invention. Jefferson’s home is the first in this line.

John Soane is the most unclassical of all the architects of Classicism, and his home itself is the strangest of all his creations. He gradually expanded the house as he bought up neighboring properties and reworked them. The result is a crowded and bewildering labyrinth of rooms of varying dimensions and shapes, oddly placed doors, shafts between floors and natural light streaming from unseen openings in every direction, including from below. Like every enlightened English gentleman of his time, Soane was a collector of antiques and paintings, and it was to house and display them that he kept adding new structures to the house. The displays so cover the walls of the tiny rooms that you can hardly pass through without bumping an ear or a nose into a Roman marble.

Home of Thomas Jefferson

1769 1784

931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway, Charlottesville, VA, USA

John Soane’s House

Home of John Soane

1792 1824

12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, England