A house is the ur-building, the quintessential embodiment of structure as shelter. Over time, as humanity evolved, it became deeply entwined with culture and commerce, with each one built reflecting a unique blend of design responding to site, environment, societal expectations, and construction costs. Recently, while planning a trip to England for a wedding, I discovered that I would be able to visit three houses that are important to my architectural perspective. The thrill I find in each is based on the building’s relationship with its designer and how it was a product of its time and culture.

Masterminds made these buildings: John Soane (1753–1837), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), and Charles Jencks (1939–2019). Each found a voice through his design: one as a life totem (Soane), one bonded with patrons (Mackintosh), and the last created a crucible of Postmodern polemics (Jencks). The role of design for each had the same outcome—an exceptional house—but the architects’ motivations could not have been more different. Below, I offer reflections on these architects and their designs in the context of their eras: late 18th/early 19th century; early 20th century; and late 20th century (aspiring to the future).

When you see the work of another architect in person, rather than through an image, you more fully grasp how it’s an extension of that designer’s personality. Experienced up close, the humanity of the designer and the universal and idiosyncratic context meet. Before I saw these houses, I studied them in books and magazines, and in architecture school, and found that we flatten their human reality in the two dimensions that we assume sufficiently convey their beauty. 

The proof of a building is best understood by being there with it. The photos here show the houses far better than any words could, but physical exposure to the actual buildings compelled me to go beyond the image and look into the lives and times of the architects. As I have designed houses for 40 years, these buildings’ resonance and connection with me was direct. (I saw the Jenck’s home only from the outside, but later did a deep dive into contemporary publications and writings.) As it happened, the order in which I visited the homes mirrored their appearance in history. Also, they offer three unique site characteristics: row house, freestanding urban house, and suburban manor house.

Soane House (1783–1834), London, England

Built over several decades by John Soane and completed toward the end of his amazing career, this structure started as a row house, then eventually tripled in size through acquisition and further construction. Unlike many dilettanes posing as designers, Soane took advantage of a society changing in response to the Industrial Revolution to work his way to architectural success. It took more than 30 years, and the world of history, art, and culture was woven into the spaces he created in his own home, which has a severely tight plan with extreme vertical spaces, all bathed in natural light thanks to the architect’s multiple approaches to skylighting. 

Soane was the son of a bricklayer, whose brother introduced him to James Peacock, a surveyor who worked with architect George Dance the Younger. Dance was a co-founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, where Soane was sent to study at age 19. In 1778, at age 26, he published Designs in Architecture, a popular book at a time when books were becoming available to the general public, and this fame ushered Soane into British society. His wealthy friends took him on the classic European Tour that helped finish his formal education. Still, it was a hand-to-mouth existence for Soane for the first decade of his career. At one point, he hired himself out to measure sites for other architects.

Like some architects today, he made influential friends who ultimately came to support his career. In 1783, he bought a townhouse and expanded it over the next four decades to showcase his space-creating genius and create a gallery for the objects he collected in his travels. 

Those travels inspired a home that was a dance with history. Soane’s peripatetic ingenuity enabled him to create a career for himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he lived on the money he made as an architect and wasn’t subsidized by a wealthy family. That distinction and his success helped define what an architect was for succeeding generations. 

Hill House (1902–1903), Glasgow, Scotland

Located a few miles outside of Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed Hill House for Walter Blackie, an up and coming publisher of art books whose family were patrons of “avant garde” architects. Blackie had seen Mackintosh’s entry in the “House for an Art Lover” competition, and his design for the Glasgow School of Art, and chose him to design a home for his young family. For Hill House, Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret (an artist-designer well-known for her own work), created something fresh amid the traditional mansions of Scottish industrialists.

The young Mackintoshes’ credibility allowed Blackie to trust in them to design all of the decoration of the home. The home is rooted in a simple floor plan that is organized around its elegant central hallway. That “modern” simplicity was made delightful in the home’s materials and allusions. Its massing was expressive and sculptural, its detailing precise and exquisitely fine arts based. 

The house manifests the dreams of clients who completely believed in Mackintosh. The architect was in his 30s, and though he knew a great deal, he had more to grow and show. In Hill House, the careful bones of plan organization were matched by exquisite detailing and art infusion. The home’s shape is both Scottish and sculptural. When I visited it, Hill House was within a massive steel tent built to stop the decay of its stucco.

Mackintosh was the fourth of 11 children and the second son of his father, a police supervisor. He went to local government schools and then to an exclusive private secondary school. At 16 he became an apprentice for a local architect; five years later he began work as a draftsman at a larger firm, where he became a partner at age 27. He then formed his own firm with his wife in 1913.

Like architects today, Mackintosh went from patron to patron, relying on commissions to live. Every opportunity, short of commission, was deemed a failure. Although his marriage was strong, the ravages of professional rejection were too hard on Mackintosh to continue relentless pursuit of commissions, so his later career was more about painting watercolors, where cost and control were his.

Thematic House/Cosmic House/Infinity House (1978–1983), London, England

In the middle of Charles Jencks’ life, at the height of the Postmodernist insurrection, the designer collected his fellow liberators and created a manifestation of all their hopes. A large townhouse was built. Every piece was custom designed, obsessionally detailed, with the details in expressive animation and allusion that approach caricature. Its central stair and all of its design elements are intended to go beyond architecture and into meanings that try to embody “Thematic,” “Cosmic,” and “Infinite” insights. 

The home was designed with architect Terry Farrell, using Farell’s employees, and other designers. It is a multidesigner pastiche, with fireplaces by Michael Graves, gardens by Jencks’ wife, Maggie, and some interiors by Johnny Grey. The complex design is not from any core need but intended for the expression of (often changing) ideas. The essence of its intensely wrought interior is based on allusion to past cultures rather than historic replication.

This extreme complexity had no less than five “project architects” from 1978 through 1983. I am guessing that the chaos of attempting universality via the means of stylistic idiosyncrasy of multiple designers was just too exhausting.

Jencks was a 20th century man, and was privilege personified: private schools, Harvard, then on to London for a Ph.D. Jencks was never a traditional architect with a master’s in the field, but a self-declared landscape designer. I find no history of him working for another firm or person—probably because he did not have to.

Much of his academic life was dedicated to the defining, categorizing, and naming of ideas, styles, and movements. He taught and wrote to define a future of design that rejected Modernism’s sterile abstractions. It was in the Thematic House that Jencks, in collaboration with others, built something that defined his vision of beauty, manifesting his ideas. This focus became the anti-establishment Postmodernism that was crystalized in his doctoral thesis, which became the 1973 book Modern Movements in Architecture.

Jencks wanted the validation of a building that crystalized his ideas. His desire was to upend the “International” (read “universal”) aesthetic of timeless, style-less style: not a composed coordination, but a “complex system” of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems he cited were cities, biology, and power plants.

Three Houses, Three Humans

Unlike most other building types, homes are extensions of the humans who make them. Seeing history inhabiting extreme spaces in the Soane house, I saw the mind of the architect, filled with history and completely enthralled with creating spatial expression. Seeing the tiny details and glints of color in the human-sized rooms of Hill House, they became portals into the joy of the designers. Seeing the passive-aggressive Postmodernist foot-stomping decrying the dominant canon, while meshing with the conservative blocks that surround it, was a clear message. Like all homes, these three are time capsules using the common currency of architecture: history, humanity and aesthetics, all in glorious collision.

All photos by the author.