Spectator competition winners: what Elon Musk’s home says about him

In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction that provides clues to their personality.

This assignment was prompted by Laura Freeman’s reference in a Spectator article
to ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in 1932. In it she describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, observing: ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’

Entries that impressed and amused me included Nick MacKinnon’s J.G. Ballard: ‘The house on its traffic island clings like a Velcro cuff around a flyover pillar, as if assessing the systolic pressure in the concrete aorta above…’ And Janine Beacham’s Falstaff: ‘Located near the Boar’s Head Inn at Windsor, it features poor overall maintenance with cracked, peeling and dirty surfaces, but also offers an impressive bar, overhanging balcony, well-used bedrooms, a vast entertainment area, and a surprisingly capacious laundry basket…’