The Cosmic House is one of those rare places deserving of the name ‘hidden gem’. A Victorian villa on a residential street near Holland Park station, it’s the former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks, who renovated the building in the late 1970s with his wife Maggie and the architect Terry Farrell to earn its Grade I-listing. Remodelled into a liveable collage of cosmic references and playful mind-games, it can be interpreted as a mediation on our place in the universe via quantum physics, architecture and philosophy. But it’s also just an extraordinarily beautiful building; a masterpiece of light, shadow and symmetry.
Since 2021, the house has operated as a museum, and each year, the Jencks Foundation commissions an artist to respond to the surroundings. This time round, it’s a video work by Lithuanian-born musician Lina Lapelytė, composed of 12 screens dotted around the house to be hunted down like a game of hide and seek.
Created in collaboration with five other artists, each screen shows a video of a musical performance taking place in the home, often right where you’re standing. In one film, singers assemble around the central spiral staircase: a dizzying kaleidoscopic shot of bodies circling a descending, twisting railing. On another screen, in the gallery basement, a performer sings a capella, sitting on the polished jade floor as light reflects in shards like a static disco ball. There is even a screen in the ‘Cosmic Loo’, complete with a mirrored ceiling and postcard-like tiling. At first listen, the sounds are odd, intriguing – and they’re played softly, forcing you to listen closely (the house, porous and bitty as it is, does not offer the best acoustics).
It’s an extraordinarily beautiful building; a masterpiece of light, shadow and symmetry
Lapelytė’s work is a response to the ‘Cosmic Oval’ at the entrance of the house: a room decorated with planetary motifs and layered Jenckisan symbolism, supposedly articulating an understanding of the world as a union of science, religion and ecology. If that all sounds a bit much, you can still enjoy the commission blind, appreciating the off-centre sounds amidst the wonderful interiors.
It helps that the house doesn’t take itself too seriously. The building is playful: in the garden, mirrored doors named after the months of the year lead to nowhere, while the ground floor tiling, which appears to be constructed from slices of green agate, is actually painted marble in disguise. Lapelytė’s work is similarly double-coded: it celebrates off-key notes, the joy of human error. The music is spine-tingling and very real – and, in relation to its intellectual surroundings, feels grounded, giving us permission to enjoy the space and its ideas on our own terms.
It’s hard to imagine the films being played outside of the house, this place of sanctuary, curiosity and child-like wonder. Robbed of their context, they might feel more sinister – the work relies on its surroundings to function, the house acting both as a stage and another performer. Beautiful and peculiar, this is immersive art as it should be.
