Life Was a STAGE...

...for Dennis Severs, who turned his London home into a highly theatrical museum-and a portal into the imagined world of Huguenot silk weavers.

- WRITTEN BY FRANCES SCHULTZ

On a recent visit to Dennis Severs' House in the Spitalfields area of East London, seven of us huddle on wooden benches in the darkened cellar, forbidden to speak. “Good e-e-e-v’ning,” begins our guide, appearing out of the gloom, holding a candle in one hand and a picture frame in the other. Clearly this is no ordinary house tour; it is performance.

“Tonight,” she intones, presenting the candle through the frame, “I will take you thr-r-rough the picture frame and into the picture,” thus commencing a story of the fictional Jervis family, Huguenots who fled persecution in France, bringing their silk-weaving skills with them. The house is less a museum than a mise-en-scène, where the scène feels momentarily vacated by its inhabitants—the Jervises—so that we curious visitors might peer into their 18th-century lives and beyond.

As a student of house museums, I have to say this is the most original and captivating house tour (or theater performance, art installation) out there—and one of the damnedest things I’ve ever seen.