The story
John Soane was the architect of the Bank of England, and he turned his own house on Lincoln's Inn Fields in London into something between a home, a studio and a cabinet of wonders. In 1833 he got Parliament to pass an act keeping it exactly as he left it after his death, so that students could come and learn. He died in 1837, and it has barely changed since.
The house is packed to the ceilings with antiquities, plaster casts, models and mirrors angled to bend the light, arranged with an architect's eye for surprise. In the basement sits the alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti the First, carved around 1300 BC, which Soane bought after the British Museum declined it and celebrated with three nights of candlelit parties.
Upstairs he built a picture room with walls that fold open, so that more paintings hang there than the space should hold, among them Hogarth's biting series A Rake's Progress, eight scenes following a young heir as he squanders a fortune.
