An Architectural Self-Portrait

Following a boldly conceived restoration, the interest and quality of Sir John Soane’s Ealing villa shines out again.

- John Goodall

IN 1833, as his eyesight failed, the 80-year-old architect Sir John Soane decisively transferred his energies from creating new buildings to the task of shaping his legacy. Over the course of the year, and in expression of this change of focus, he resigned his coveted post of Surveyor of the Bank of England and obtained an Act of Parliament giving his home and its contents in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the nation ‘for the study of architecture and the allied arts’; the house is now Sir John Soane’s Museum.

The museum remains Soane’s most well known legacy, but this celebrated architect created another much less familiar building for himself that was previously home to his collections and invested with deep personal significance. So much so, indeed, that, in one lecture to the Royal Academy, he actually described its façade as a self-portrait (Fig 6). A restoration completed this spring brings it back to public attention once more, convincingly revived in many respects as its creator knew it.

As part of the process of writing his own history in 1833, Soane also published the wordily entitled Plans, elevations and perspective views of Pitzhanger Manorhouse and of the ruins of an edifice of Roman architecture… formerly the residence of the author of this work. To which is added memoirs of his family and his own professional life etc. in letters to a friend from 1802–32.