A 16th-century chamberpot has its own precise place in history, but it’s unlikely to provide fertile ground for your renovation moodboard.
Here are 10 of the best historic homes to visit for interiors inspiration, all in or within easy reach of the capital.
The Cosmic House, Holland Park
Part-house museum, part-parallel universe, the Holland Park home of late architect Charles Jencks induced plenty of interior design whiplash when it opened its doors to the public two years ago.
The signs are there from the start — this is a house that wears its whimsy on its stuccoed sleeve, with a sprinkle of exterior alterations — but little will prepare visitors for the unfettered imagination on display within, from cosmos-inspired lobby to Hindu temple-turned-kitchen.
Further highlights include a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-meets-PoMo bedroom and the library, where what appear to be ornately carved wooden bookcases are, unapologetically, painted MDF.
Fantasy feature: every room will cast you wide of your comfort zone — and perhaps that’s precisely the point — but the summer room, with its sunken seating and garden outlook, is a moment of pure pleasure.
How to visit: tickets released in batches for tours from Wednesday to Sunday. The mailing list is a must. £5 (jencksfoundation.org).
Dorich House Museum, Kingston
The former home and studio of sculptor Dora Gordine and her husband, scholar Richard Hare – the moniker is a portmanteau of their own names — this imposing 1930s build was designed by Gordine herself and restored by Kingston University following her death.
Influenced by previous homes in Estonia, Latvia, France, and Malaysia, her dream house is a sculpture writ large, with vast Crittall windows, vertical brick mullions and semi-circular motifs on all sides.
If a hidden gem exists in London, then here it is — filled with Gordine’s works, the interior is an exercise in light and space, executed with an artist’s eye for detail.
Fantasy feature: in the apartment on the top floor, pocket doors disappear into a circular portal to reveal the dining room.
How to visit: the museum reopens on 1st September. Sign up to the newsletter for updates (dorichhousemuseum.org.uk).
The Homewood, Esher
This suburban gem is the precise vision of architect Patrick Gwynne, who proved himself a precocious talent when he designed a replacement for the Victorian family home in 1939, aged 24.
Modern with a capital M, it is the closest thing Britain has to a Le Corbusier — and yet here and there are hints of the English country house, with its two wings at right angles and dedicated staff quarters.
Gwynne spent decades modifying the house as modernism evolved and at his death bequeathed it to the National Trust, on the proviso that it remains, as intended, a private home.
Fantasy feature: designed to the mirror the rhythm of the glazing, the built-in wall units in Indian laurel hide a drinks cabinet, hi-fi and serving hatch.
How to visit: bookings go live online on Thursday mornings for the first Saturday of every month and subsequent Fridays, until October. £12 (nationaltrust.org.uk).
Charleston Farmhouse, Firle
Something close to a lodestar for the British interiors scene, this Sussex farmhouse was once the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who pulled out the paintbrushes swifly after arriving in 1916.
It is a paean to the very act of decoration — no surface was safe from the pair, who rejected the rigidity of Edwardian style and instead took inspiration from Italian fresco painting and the Post-Impressionists.
The Bloomsbury colour palette is startlingly modern, with dusky roses, aubergines and mossy greens that in their faded splendour mimic the modish trend for textured lime plaster.
Fantasy feature: the frescoed fireplaces, including the Neopolitan-hued abstract one in Clive Bell’s study, have become a byword for Bloomsbury style.
How to visit: open Wednesday to Sunday, £18.50 (charleston.org.uk).
David Parr House, Cambridge
Behind the ordinary façade of a late Victorian terrace in Cambridge is a perfect snapshop of one century turning into another.
Save for some flourishes atop the windows, there is little to suggest the perfectly preserved Arts and Crafts interior within, which is the result of painstaking efforts to save the domestic efforts of a working class artist-decorator who bought the house in 1886.
David Parr once served on projects by William Morris, but all the while quietly worked on the house until his death in 1927. His granddaughter Elsie lived here for 84 years before turning it over to a trust.
Fantasy feature: the intricate Morris patterns Parr painted on the walls in oils, perhaps only topped by the richly frescoed ceiling in the drawing room.
How to visit: guided tours on Thursdays, Saturdays and Fridays until the end of August. £16 (davidparrhouse.org).
2 Willow Road, Hampstead
You won’t spot this Hampstead home on The Modern House any time soon, though numbers 1 and 3, now in private hands, could one day prove a consolation prize.
All ribbon windows and rationalist red brick, the Thirties-built family home of Hungarian architect ErnÅ Goldfinger is still a glorious anomaly among Victorian villas. This is the house that so horrified neighbour Ian Fleming that the fallout produced a Bond villain.
In today’s context, the controversy seems an absurdity — the footprint is modest and the interior at once louche and ultilitarian, with wood-panelled partitions and low-slung bespoke furniture, plus works by Henry Moore and Bridget Riley. The UK’s modernist mecca.
Fantasy feature: the central spiral staircase, designed by Danish engineer Ove Arup to save on superfluous landings. It’s illuminated by a circular skylight at the top of the house.
How to visit: tickets are released every two weeks for guided tours on Thursdays and Saturdays, from March to October. £10 (nationaltrust.org.uk).
Turn End, Haddenham
The boundaries of inside and out are blurred at Turn End, one of three houses built by architect Peter Aldington in the mid 1960s.
Arranged around a garden which itself resembled a series of rooms, this is modernism with a faintly Mediterranean flavour, all sloping roofs, quarry tiled floors and connection to the courtyard.
So well-received was the project — recognition came quickly with a RIBA award in 1970 — that it’s credited with putting this quiet Buckinghamshire village on the map. The buildings are among only a handful of postwar houses to be Grade II* listed.
Fantasy feature: the living area, with its built-in seating, Isamu Noguchi pendant and timber mono pitch roof.
How to visit: open days and group visits. 2024 dates are up for a Turn End and Middle Turn double bill. £20 (turnend.org.uk).
Eltham Palace, Eltham
By all metrics the big draw at Eltham Palace should be the 700-year-old medieval hall, immortalised by JMW Turner in the 18th century.
But the star of this curious amalgam, once home to Henry VIII, is the 1930s extension, added by the Courtaulds alongside restoration works.
A magnet for locations scouts, its sensational Art Deco interiors have turned up in Brideshead Revisited, The Crown and a music video for Florence and the Machine — playing itself, for once — who all made good use of its time-warp glamour.
Fantasy feature: the circular entrance hall is a lesson in light and proportion, with its central dome and clerestory windows – and the abstract rug could have been designed today.
How to visit: open daily until early November, when it’s weekend-only until mid-February. £16 with donation (english-heritage.org.uk).
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
More collector’s house than museum, Kettle’s Yard has been open to the public in some form or another since Jim Ede and his wife Helen converted four cottages into one rather unconventional abode in 1957.
Jim, who once said the house was ‘only alive when used’, swiftly designated 2-4pm each day as an open house, when students of the University of Cambridge could wander and even borrow the odd work.
An expansion project in recent years has done little to disturb its domestic heart, which has long proved a valuable resource for interior designers and assorted aesthetes, who draw on its natural light, honesty of materials and remarkable sense of quietude.
Fantasy feature: the house is best taken as a whole, but the stepped entrance to the Bechstein room is one of its best moments.
How to visit: open year-round, from Tuesday to Sunday. £10.50, or free for under 25s (kettlesyard.co.uk).
Farleys House and Gallery, nr Chiddingly
Some thirty years after Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and David Garnett unleashed a Bloomsbury blizzard at Charleston, artist Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller settled into Farleys House up the road.
Clearly there was something in the water in this bucolic corner of Sussex. Here are country signifiers with a witty surrealist twist — the mood is most neatly embodied by the single Picasso tile above the Aga – and a rotating cast of Man Rays and Mirós on the wall.
Above all, the house is distinctly unprecious. The drawers are still filled with utensils and among the pedigree paintings kitsch found objects and curios, from a pottery chicken to a mummified rat.
Fantasy feature: the hearth in the dining room was wrapped in a vibrant mural of the Long Man of Wilmington by Penrose in 1950.
How to visit: guided house tours on Thursdays and Sundays until October, with all day admission to galleries and garden. £22.50 (farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk).
