The homes of famous artists make for very particular—and, in the right hands—very special museums. Supposedly domestic worlds, they have been built or adapted by their creative residents, within their lifetimes, to simultaneously display art and artifacts. Leighton House and Gainsborough’s House are such places: homes reflecting artistic views that have become museums and cherished cultural institutions. Recent extensions and renovations to these two complexes show how architects can provide curators with a museum that offers an intimate, novel experience of art to the public, an art integrated with life rather than serving abstract ideas. While architects in Europe are expected, increasingly, to resist demolition and incorporate pre-existing buildings into any new piece of architecture, the work on these small buildings constitutes essays—aesthetically sophisticated ones, given the artistic nature of the original structures—on how architecture must now be conceived.
The transformation of both Leighton House in London and Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, 70 miles northwest of the capital, has required the removal or adaptation of 20th-century additions. In the case of Leighton House, a series of store rooms that had been created within a 1920s Arts & Crafts extension called the Perrin Wing, had to be removed, enabling a new café to occupy the central space on the ground floor, with windows added to the rear. At Gainsborough’s House, it was an adjacent 1930s government building that went, allowing the institution to stretch to the east.
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