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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
Charles Jencks rebuilt his own 1840s terrace house as a diagram of the year, and it is Grade I for it.
HousesContemporaryYou can go inside
From the street it is an 1840s terrace house and almost nothing gives it away - except the front door, where the double doorknobs and applied mouldings make a face, and the fanlight above it hides the initials of the family inside. Charles Jencks remodelled the house between 1979 and 1985 with the Terry Farrell Partnership, and Historic England listed it at the top grade in 2018, which for a building of the 1980s is close to unheard of.
The organising idea is time. At the centre is the Solar Stair: fifty-two steps for the weeks of the year, each riser divided into seven for the days, zodiac discs set into the step ends, and orbs on its three handrails for the paths of the sun, earth and moon. At the bottom is a Black Hole mosaic by Eduardo Paolozzi. The ground-floor rooms radiate off it in order - Winter at the front, Spring behind, Summer the dining room, Indian Summer the kitchen, Autumn the pantry - so that walking round the stair walks you through a year.
The detail does not let up. The entrance hall is an ellipse Jencks called the cosmic oval, under a frieze by William Stok of Imhotep, Pythagoras, Hadrian, Erasmus, Donne, Borromini, Jefferson and Hannah Arendt in conversation with each other. Michael Graves designed the Winter and Spring fireplaces. The library's shelves are built as a village of little houses, one per period of architecture from Egyptian to Post-Modern, so the shelf itself tells you where to look. Piers Gough designed the jacuzzi as an inverted dome after Borromini. On the garden front, the four stepped openings are a family: two dormers for the children, one conservatory for the mother, one for the father.
It is a museum now, run by the foundation in Jencks's name, and it is small - fifteen people at a time - so the booking is the hard part rather than the visit.
By timed ticket only. Tickets go on sale at noon on the third Friday of each month for the month after, four per booking.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.