Tucked neatly away in a street of almost identical Georgian houses, an unassuming Grade ll-listed home sits quietly waiting to be explored. Step inside and you are instantly transported to the historical fantasy world of a family of Huguenot silk weavers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Welcome to the Dennis Severs' House. But who created this incredible home and why? What secrets lie behind each door?
Discover the chambers of this fascinating historic home and meet the man who spent years creating it...
Built in 1724, this Georgian house was at the heart of Huguenot community of silk merchants and weavers. These talented artists worked with silk and cloth but had to flee their homeland of France to escape religious persecution.
Fast forward to the 1970s and American artist Dennis Severs bought the derelict property at 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, London. But it wasn't to be his home, although he did live there.
Instead, Severs set about making it his life’s work to transform the five-storey townhouse into a living and breathing monument to a glorious chapter of its past.
Severs, pictured here, purchased the abandoned house from the Spitalfields Trust, which was trying to rescue historical buildings of the area threatened with demolition by the expansion of the financial district.
Born in California, he was the son of Earl and Helen Severs, who already had four sons between them from earlier marriages. A true Anglophile, he visited England for the first time in 1965 and moved to London just two years later to study law.
Dennis Severs loved the city’s history and was a natural showman. He abandoned his law degree and began working as a conductor of horse-drawn tours through west London.
During carriage rides through Hyde Park, he told stories of the past as if they were happening in the present, a technique that would be fully realised in the house on Folgate Street.
Spitalfields, London is seen here in 1923, when its narrow streets were usually busy and congested due to the nearby Spitalfields Market. Dennis Severs’ House is just visible on the right. The area remained a busy part of the capital throughout every decade.
By the 1970s, it was run-down and cheap, attracting fellow artists like Gilbert and George who refurbished a similar house in the neighbourhood.
However, Severs' idea was a little unusual. He arranged each room to represent the changing fortunes of the house, as Spitalfields moved from being an affluent merchants’ quarter in the 18th century to a crowded and decayed slum during the Victorian era.
With a tight budget, Severs designed the interior like a series of still-life paintings, creating scenes of the everyday life of the imaginary Jervis family, as if they had just stepped out and would return at any moment.
"With a candle, a chamber pot and a bedroll, I began sleeping in each of the house's ten rooms so that I might arouse my intuition in the quest for each room's soul,'' he said, as reported by British newspaper The Guardian.
He is seen here with his partner, ceramicist Simon Pettet, dressed in footman’s livery. Pettet's work decorates the home he shared with Severs, dotted around almost every room.
Dennis immediately opened the house up for tours, putting a sign on the door declaring "Aut Visum Aut Non" (You either see it or you don’t), insisting that visitors enter fully into the sensory journey through the house.
A trip around its rooms takes in the changing sounds and smells of the different eras as well as detailed interior design elements.
Artist David Hockney allegedly described his visit as “one of the world’s five great experiences”, while its rooms have featured in countless photo shoots and in Dr Lucy Worsley’s BBC documentary, At Home with the Georgians.
Since Severs died in 1999, the house has been carefully maintained by staff who replenish the fresh food, fires and candles daily to ensure that every visitor will experience the house as Severs intended.
Every inch of the space has been used to tell the story of a family home through furnishings and historical objects. And for those of you unable to travel to see it in person, we're about to take you on a tour...
Tours begin in the basement in the servants’ kitchen, where a fire is crackling in the hearth and the smell of spices and just-baked bread makes you feel that the cook has just stepped away from her stove.
An oak dresser is stacked with crockery and the chairs are pulled up to the fire.
Next door is the dimly lit cellar with its exposed brickwork and low ceilings, which remind us of the humble beginnings of the Jervis family.
Full of cobwebs, dust and grime, a single lantern reveals a pile of excavated rubble, the remains of the original hospital which stood on this spot back in 1197.
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Upstairs on the ground floor, a dining room with a table covered in dirty plates and half-drunk glasses and a clock ticking loudly in the background evokes a more prosperous period in the family’s history.
Severs furnished the house with items he picked up in antique shops and bric-a-brac stalls, not always necessarily historically accurate, but always evocative of the era.
The dining room is transformed each year for the annual Spitalfields Christmas at Dennis Severs’ House when the table is set for a festive feast.
Timeless Christmas displays of fruits and pine branches decorate the candlelit room, while scents of cloves, cinnamon, ginger and oranges linger in the air.
There is no electricity in the house, so the use of candles and lanterns enhances the atmosphere, allowing visitors to lose themselves in the illusion of stepping back in time to Christmas past.
This ghostly image was taken when the house was shrouded while work was undertaken to sweep the chimneys, but it could have just as easily served as a Halloween set on a spooky film.
It would be easy to believe the house is haunted when the sound of footsteps on creaky floorboards and the ticking and chiming of clocks create an eerie creepy vibe. However, there's an easy explanation:
Severs had friends working behind the scenes to help bring the tours to life, literally. They’d walk up and down the creaking stairs and slam doors. He wanted his guests to feel that the Jervises were just out of sight somewhere.
The first-floor drawing room represents a family at the height of its wealth and influence in the mid-18th century.
Decorated in ornate furnishings, damask drapes and fine art, the elegance of the room reflects the family’s position in society and the riches they had made from the lucrative silk trade.
Placed centrally is a marble fireplace, which gives the room its sense of harmony so important to late 18th-century neoclassical ideals.
The mantle displays porcelain figures and what might look like carvings made from walnuts strung together with fishing wire above the fireplace. The carvings were made by Grinling Gibbons, an Anglo-Dutch sculptor and wood carver known for his work in Hampton Court Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and Windsor Castle.
Next door in the Smoking Room, where the master of the house might have entertained his friends after dinner, a replica of a Hogarth painting above the fireplace depicts a group of drunken men around a punch bowl, falling off their chairs.
The painting might almost have come to life in this scene of over-turned chairs and bottles on the table. Wood-panelled walls and a deep, dark colour palette make this room feel intimate. The scent of wine and tobacco is heavy in the air as daylight streams through the window.
Visitors today can book a variety of tours, one of which is meant to be undertaken in silence. It allows them to truly absorb the décor and design of the home.
As they make their way up these narrow stairs, the creak after a lifetime of footsteps of former inhabitants and countless guests creates a real sense of history.
The succession of richly decorated rooms on the upper floors Severs described as “a collection of atmospheres: moods that harbour the light and spirit of various ages”, reports arts website Artistic Miscellany.
The master bedroom on the second floor, where Severs slept when he was living here, is dominated by a grand over-the-top four-poster canopy bed complete with rumpled sheets.
Although it may look like a genuine example of Rococo-style furniture, it was made by Severs himself from pallets and polystyrene, according to interiors magazine House & Garden. He was fond of upcycling and transforming unexpected items into furniture.
The elaborate fireplace's whimsical design is inspired by the façade of Baroque Christ Church in Spitalfields. It is surrounded by china that Severs once said is a mix of “real 18th-century junk” and souvenirs he’d picked up at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport as reported by the Financial Times.
The tiles that line the interior of the fireplace are another clever touch. They are designed to resemble Delft pottery, a Dutch tin-glazed earthenware. Mostly blue and white, it is named for the city of Delft in the Netherlands, which was once the centre of its production.
Ceramicist Simon Pettet made the tiles which feature tiny hand-painted images. They are said to be so authentic and close to their Delft inspiration that they are almost indistinguishable from those manufactured in 17th-century Holland.
However, a closer inspection reveals a showcase of neighbours and friends painted on them, including artists Gilbert and George (top right) and the social historian Raphael Samuel.
On the dressing table in the bedroom are strewn trinkets and pearls. You'll see a mirror the lady of the house inherited from her grandmother, and a collection of more blue and white porcelain bequeathed by her aunt, Lady Bolingbroke.
Perhaps the most personal of the countless objects and ornaments within the home is this Rococo-style dress. It belonged to Mrs Jervis. Her impressive portrait hangs above.
The delicately embroidered fabric of the gown, the glasses left on the table alongside her personal letters, as well as the lingering scent of ginger and rosemary which infuse the air, bear witness to a lady of culture and refinement who once resided here.
The room's light paintwork reflects the feminine nature of this room.
By the time we reach the upper of the five floors of the house, the fortunes of the Jervis family over the generations have dwindled.
The staircase is filthy and full of cobwebs, the floorboards are rickety, and threadbare laundry drapes from the ceiling. Clothes and shoes are strewn across the rooms to evoke a cramped feeling.
The bedrooms on the upper floors are in stark contrast to the opulence of those below.
With décor from around 1837, this could well be a room for lodgers, whom the Jervis family were forced to take in when the silk trade diminished and they were at their lowest ebb.
Simple pieces and wooden floors without the comfort (or expense) of rugs reflect poorer demographics of the time and what a typical home might have looked like when money was tight.
The final room on the tour is back downstairs and we're back to wealthier times. It's the cluttered sitting room of school teacher Miss Jervis, which is festooned with fussy floral wallpaper and photographs, mostly of an older Queen Victoria and her family.
As the story of the Dennis Severs' House takes its final turn, we are told it is 1887. And after fifty years on the throne, Queen Victoria is celebrating her Golden Jubilee.
This room is filled with numerous items Severs collected over the years to bejewel his creation. We particularly enjoy the pair of ceramic King Charles' Spaniel dogs that stand guard on either side of the gilded clock.
It takes passion and hard work to maintain Severs' vision. The house closed in early 2021 while a small army of craftsmen and women worked to renew the treasure chest of objects inside for a grand reopening that summer.
Among them was fabric specialist Johanna Garrad. She was in charge of cleaning and dressing fabrics, the drapery, curtains, beds and pieces of costume.
“Many drapes had fallen down and it was often a puzzle to rehang something that had once been hung up in a haphazard fashion yet to magnificent effect,” she told the BBC. “I was fascinated by the degree to which the house is not a museum collection but a theatre set, and we needed to be aware of that theatricality when we put things back.”
Clock specialist Gilbert Bastien helped repair and revive a collection of antique clocks dating back to 1720. “I love the finesse of this French clock and it’s my favourite at Dennis Severs’ House,” he told the BBC.
“I enjoy taking an old clock that has not been cleaned for many years and bringing it back to life as it would have been in the 18th century. In Dennis Severs’ House, it is as if time stood still.”
Shortly before he died in 1999, Severs bequeathed the house to the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, who have continued to run the house as he intended.
The neighbourhood has changed somewhat since then. Glass and concrete-clad skyscrapers loom overhead, while shops and restaurants regularly change hands to keep pace with Londoners’ ever-evolving tastes and fashions.
Constant and still, however, is the Dennis Severs’ House, which remains a beautifully preserved time capsule and window into the past.
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