Absurd and amusing, solemn and scholarly: Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House reviewed

An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets, having spent a fortune on the atrium, the concert hall, the galleries, spent pennies on the bogs.

The smallest rooms at Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House are among the loveliest loos in London with windows on to the garden and a ‘Jencksiana’ mirror over the sink. This was the Baltimore-born writer, critic and landscape designer’s take on the ‘Serliana’ window devised by the mannerist architect Sebastiano Serlio and it recurs throughout this mad and marvellous post-modern house.

Jencks died in 2019 leaving his house on Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park as a stucco memorial. From the pavement, there isn’t much to distinguish No. 19 from its 19th-century neighbours. Inside, it’s another matter. Jencks intended his house as a ‘provocation’. It tweaks the nose and digs the ribs. It is absurd and amusing, solemn and scholarly.