The family home is a space of compromise. Within its walls, parents negotiate multiple psyches while juggling work and care, and children grow from helpless babies into adults with their own tastes and desires. So what happens when the house is a monoculture; when the home is created as a temple to the father’s genius?

The houses of famous architects, artists and intellectuals such as Sir John Soane, Donald Judd and Sigmund Freud have been preserved and revered. In these spaces, the domestic becomes overrun with the psyche of the man who lived there: their ideas and concepts are writ large throughout, a potent masculinity run riot across the house. This patriarchal supremacy often means that the interests and tastes of the father command the space, perhaps literalising male dominance in our wider culture. Could these homes have a narcissistic inflection? Freud posited that the narcissist fails to distinguish themselves from surrounding objects and people (he was writing before narcissistic personality disorder was formulated as a diagnosis, exploring these tendencies as they may develop from childhood). Instead, everything around them, animate and inanimate, serves to reflect or mirror their ego. Within these homes, the collected objects become tools to express the father’s mind. In some cases, this includes the children themselves.

Sir John Soane had a famously troubled relationship with his children. The British architect, whose former home at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is now preserved as Sir John Soane’s Museum, had a burning desire for his two sons to continue his work. He longed for an architectural dynasty to carry on his legacy, specifically through the management and development of the creative home. He owned two main properties: Pitzhanger Manor, a country house in Ealing that he bought in 1800, which housed numerous architectural items and paintings by artists such as Canaletto and Hogarth; and 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, purchased in 1792 and later expanded to two buildings next door, now stuffed to the rafters with collected items, artworks, and altars to his own creativity. Upon buying these homes, he demolished all but one wing of Pitzhanger Manor and Lincoln’s Inn Fields in its entirety, rebuilding both in his own Neoclassical style.

Like many men of his generation, Soane was a hands-off father. His wife, Elizabeth Soane, managed much of the parenting while he travelled, and both of his sons, John and George, were sent to boarding school. In lieu of a close emotional relationship, the elder Soane saw a line of creative contact running through his family. John, the eldest son, did initially take up architecture as a profession, but his father felt he lacked the skills required to match his own. Soane saw his namesake as a wasted effort and moved his attention instead to his grandson, hoping that he would eventually take over the estate. But both men died before Soane; his son of consumption in his late thirties, and his grandson in his early twenties.

John Soane’s younger surviving son, George, wanted to be seen as a literary success, and rejected his father’s attempts to pull him into the family business at all costs. He rebelled against his parents, marrying a woman they did not approve of and going onto the stage – a profession that his mother especially saw as a social embarrassment. After years of lending George money, his parents cut him off and he fell into debt, eventually being imprisoned for fraud in 1814. Upon his release in 1815, George published two thinly veiled anonymous attacks on his father’s architectural style in The Champion magazine. He compared his father unfavourably to the architect Robert Smirke, which he knew would rile him, claiming that with his houses he had created a mausoleum to himself, likening Soane to a eunuch in a seraglio, surrounded by objects he couldn’t appreciate.

The articles enraged his father, and his unwell mother declared that George had delivered her final death blows in these humiliating pieces. She died soon afterward, and Soane blamed his son for her death for the rest of his life. His bitter feelings became part of the house. He framed the articles with the words “death blows” written on them and hung them prominently on the wall. He also displayed Thomas Banks’s bust of a young George on the stairs, referencing a quote from Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III in his personal notes about the sculpture: “the aspiring youth who fired the Ephesian Dome / Outlives in fame the pious fool that rais’d it.” This line in turn refers to the Greek tale of Herostratus, who burned down the Temple of Artemis – a Seventh Wonder of the Ancient World – to immortalise his own name. Soane quite clearly saw parallels between George and Herostratus in his selection of this quote, aligning his son with the violent destruction of the temple. Yet Herostratus’ drive for notoriety and immortalisation is very akin to Soane’s own desires, creating his “temple” in the first place, with dreams of a rich legacy.

John Soane dramatically played out a Shakespearean family tragedy in the very design and setup of the home, privately comparing himself to King Lear with two ungrateful children. The architect commissioned Henry Howard to paint a portrait of himself and his wife as Lear and Cordelia on the beach at the end of the tragedy. He also fantasised about a loving family, acquiring Richard Westall’s watercolour of John Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters, celebrating the duty of the blind poet’s children in his later years. Throughout many of these creative, highly personal acts around the home, Soane can be seen consumed by vengeance, clinging onto long-held desires of who his children should have been to him. He chose the home as his battleground, rejecting his son from the very space intended to house him. In waging his familial war so visibly on the walls of the home, he left no doubt as to whose territory it was.

In his frustration, the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields became a replacement child. He sold Pitzhanger Manor in 1810, realising that it would not carry on in the family name, and in 1833 lobbied Parliament for a new bill that would allow him to turn Lincoln’s Inn Fields into a national museum. The idea was controversial at the time, as the architect chose to cut off his family’s inheritance and funnel his life’s work and finances into the home instead. His focus turned to protecting his vast collection and the legacy of his work when he realised this would not come from his sons.

Soane had been a self-made man, the working-class son of a bricklayer who had died when the architect was a teenager. As a youth, Soane started out as a hod carrier for his father, and he had perhaps harboured hopes of a richer future for his children. Bruce Boucher, the former director of Sir John Soane’s Museum and author of the recently published John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Yale University Press), sees a connection between his obsessive collecting and his relationship with his sons. He recalls speaking with a psychiatrist with little prior knowledge of Soane’s work, who said he sounded like a classic narcissist. “He ticked all the boxes,” says Boucher. “His inflexibility. His lack of empathy. That he had both a high opinion of himself and a very fragile ego. He didn’t like being crossed by anyone and he was constantly in litigation throughout his life. It wasn’t just with his sons. He was often publishing pamphlets to defend himself. His actions were like a number of other collectors I have come across, which are motivated by an insatiable need to acquire things, to possess them. It gives you a temporary gratification, but it doesn’t end.”

Soane’s voracious desire to possess, and to display his feelings so proudly throughout the house, left little space for his sons, who variously rebelled, attacked and failed to fit the role he desperately wanted for them. His home now is an intriguing architectural spectacle to behold, but undoubtedly also a testament to the suffocating power of the father’s will.

Donald Judd’s children describe growing up at New York’s 101 Spring Street as a warmer experience. The radical artist bought the five-storey townhouse in 1968, turning it into both a domestic space and artist’s studio, with every room exhaling his highly distinctive aesthetic. For Judd – though he rejected the minimalist label – this meant sparse decoration with clean lines, rich panels of light and colour, bold geometric shapes, and pared-back furniture. His own bed sat upon a low platform, with little else in the room, favouring aesthetic over practical considerations (the design allegedly often failed to hold the pillows in place). A lone box covered in knives made by Lucas Samaras sat next to the bed, which Judd’s son, Flavin, says was his favourite piece of art when he was a child. Judd designed the furniture throughout the house, which also featured a puppet theatre; a pile of bricks in the entrance hall (Manifest Destiny by Carl Andre, 1986); and a potbelly stove that functioned as the only source of heat in the house for a while. The family lived alongside roughly 200 artworks installed by Judd, made by himself and fellow artists including Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, and Marcel Duchamp.

The creation of 101 Spring Street went far beyond Judd’s desire to build a family home. It was intended as the perfect place in which to view his own works, an environment in which he could manage the space, light, scale, and proportions in precise detail. This was a house, art gallery, studio, and shrine to his creativity all rolled into one. As for Soane, the idea of legacy was central to Judd’s thinking. His home was not created just for his lifetime, but as a way of preserving his work in the manner in which he wanted it to be seen. As he wrote, “Frequently, as much thought has gone into the placement of a piece as into the piece itself. It is my hope that such of my works of art which I own at the time of my death will be preserved where they are installed.”

This could also have become a stifling experience for the children living in the home, but both are now involved in its management. Flavin and his sister Rainer lived at 101 Spring Street in their early childhoods, before moving to Marfa, Texas, after Judd’s divorce from their mother, Julie M Finch, in the 1970s. The children moved back to New York in their teenage years and have both been involved in the preservation of the home following Judd’s death in 1994. 101 Spring Street opened to the public in 2013. “I think that’s very sentimental,” Rainer said of the restoration and their decision not to sell the property. “The whole reason this exists, in a way, is because we care about every little inch and, at the end of the day, because we were raised by somebody who was so generous to us and taught us so much that we wanted to honour what he gave us and what he made in the world. So I think this whole project wouldn’t exist unless we were, to be really cheesy, just full of love.”

It is not just Judd’s children who live inside his legacy. We are all now residing in Judd’s house to some degree. While not many family homes carry the intensity of 101 Spring Street, Judd’s aesthetic has bled heavily into mainstream interior design. Publications and artists from the New York Times to Elmgreen & Dragset have credited Judd with the explosion of the neo-industrial look that finds itself applied to ex-warehouses and townhouses in cities around the world. He might have baulked at the plastic rip-offs, but he has surely played a role in the contemporary proliferation of everything from affordable stacking shelves to colourful strip lighting and stark workbenches in expensive kitchens. Judd’s legacy has found its way into many of our homes, quietly dominating our day-to-day life.

Other artists and architects have taken things even further than Judd, creating homes that push the limits of domestic rationality. Artist Sam Cox, otherwise known as Mr Doodle, hit the news in 2021, when images were published of his six-bedroom Kent house with every possible surface covered in monochrome drawings. Everything from the bed to the ceilings, toaster, chimney, exterior of the house, and artist’s car are scrawled with the same black and white doodles. This obsessive creative act cost him 900 litres of white emulsion and over 400 cans of black spray paint. Practical items such as the hob and oven have become devoid of function because the doodles are so thoroughly embedded. The house is referred to by the artist as his own “paradise”, the physical realisation of a teenage dream. His wife Alana Kutsenko has taken on the identity of Mrs Doodle, joining him in painting sessions online, with both dressed in garments covered with his drawings. Their child “Baby Doodle” already has their own Instagram account, which launched with an ultrasound of the couple’s “best collaboration”. Now the child’s own early drawings fill the feed. Within their shared space, the artist’s inner world has quite literally taken over every surface, though it is presented as something of a love story, with Mrs Doodle taking on her husband’s creative identity as an outwardly playful act of devotion. 

In stark contrast with these artists’ and architects’ houses, who all have a large following in their own right, Ron’s Place was created in total secrecy. It was only when Ron Gittins died in 2019, that his family unlocked his rented Birkenhead flat and discovered the intense alterations he had made to it. Throughout his life, the outsider artist turned his home into an homage to a classical villa, inspired by the architecture and interiors from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. He covered the walls in murals depicting historical scenes, even fitting a giant concrete Minotaur head above one of the fireplaces. When his family accessed the home, they found it filled with papier-mâché body parts, piles of art materials, and hand-written notes in secret code. Gittins was the second of three children and became estranged from his family at various points throughout his life. “He didn’t seem to worry if other people sometimes thought he was mad,” his niece Jan Williams told the press. “I think he believed he was ahead of the game somehow and if other people didn’t get it then that was their problem.” Since his death, Williams and The Caravan Gallery’s Chris Teasdale have led a campaign to keep his legacy alive, with the flat becoming the first outsider art environment to be listed in the UK. While finding a physical realisation in the house’s unique renovation, Ron kept his home as a private psychological experience, accessible, in his lifetime, only to himself. In place of an immediate family life, the intense attention he gave to his home could be seen as an alternative expression of fatherly creation; one that becomes simultaneously an act of self-parenting, creating a safely enclosed domestic space within which his mind was mirrored back to him.

The psyche of the father is nowhere more entangled with the domestic space than in the home of Sigmund Freud. The revolutionary psychiatrist had a mixed relationship with his children and those who granted him a paternal role. As the founder of the new discipline of psychoanalysis, his legacy was of great importance to him. Freud saw numerous detractors from his key theories, as other psychiatrists and psychologists began to reshape the boundaries of psychoanalytic thought. He famously fell out with Carl Jung, whom he at one time referred to as his eldest son, when the younger, more spiritually focused psychiatrist veered from his central tenet of libidinal drives. Jung felt that Freud placed his own authority and figurehead position above finding the truth, while Freud could not accept Jung’s fascination with mysticism and the occult.

“It is an honour to have plenty of enemies!” Freud wrote in his famous correspondence with Jung. When they eventually began to part ways, their relationship continued to play out, suitably, in Jung’s famous dream of 1909 which took place in a domestic home. Freud became convinced that Jung harboured a death wish towards him when the latter told him of a dream he had that included a pair of old, half-decaying skulls sitting in the basement of a house. While the two never lived together in waking life, it was as though Freud had taken up a paternalistic role in the basement of Jung’s psyche. While Jung explained the skulls as being symbolic of the collective unconscious, Freud’s fears were not unfounded. “At that time Freud had lost much of his authority for me. But he still meant to me a superior personality, upon whom I projected the father, and at the time of the dream this projection was still far from eliminated,” Jung writes in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961). He also writes about his dream of a ghostly, melancholy, elderly customs official, who “couldn’t die properly”, and a knight in full armour, charging through a modern city similar to his hometown of Basel. Jung could see representations of Freud in both; his ambivalence towards him as a stubborn elder refusing to make room for alternative thought, intersecting with his admiration for an inspirational father figure.

It was eventually in his daughter Anna that Freud found a firm foundation for his legacy. He often referred to Anna as his favourite child, reportedly leading to some resentment from the rest of the family. She was the only one of his children to follow him into psychoanalysis. Their family home in London now demonstrates both their relationship and the father’s legacy, with his study preserved in pristine detail. Like Soane, Freud was a keen collector of items that held special significance for him, from Neolithic tools to Pompeian penis amulets. He apparently felt so close to his collection that he would bring items to the dinner table, joining the meal as members of the family themselves. His study is the ultimate expression of the Victorian father’s workspace in the house, now granted a special place of intellectual heft within the historic home.

The working identities of both Sigmund and Anna, and their psychoanalytic approach to working with patients, is clearly visualised in their domestic consulting rooms. In Sigmund’s study, complete with famous couch gifted to the psychiatrist by his patient Madame Benvenisti around 1890, the contents of his mind spill out into the space. It still feels intimidating to walk into, with row upon row of books and antiquities. Anna took a more practical approach to the design of her consulting room, with far fewer objects of her own, and drawing materials laid out for her young patients to work with. While Sigmund took up the paternalistic position sitting behind his patients on the couch where they couldn’t see him – a pose intended to encourage free association that contemporary psychotherapy often criticises for its hierarchical feeling – Anna often tended to work on the floor in an attempt to gain the trust of the children she mostly worked with.

Sigmund only lived at the home that has now become The Freud Museum for a year. The family fled Austria as it was annexed by the Nazis, and his study was set up in London in almost exact detail from its previous iteration in his former Viennese apartment. It was a great comfort and relief for Freud to live his last year in safety in London, surrounded by his artefacts and study as he had known it. While Anna lived in the home for another four decades after his death, Sigmund’s study and work continue to reverberate through its walls. In this home, life, work, and the father’s psyche truly became enmeshed, with his daughter both taking on his legacy and forging one of her own.    

The dominance of the father – and his patrimony – is richly at play in Freud’s concept of the superego. He suggested that the superego develops as a resolution to the Oedipus complex, in which the young child fantasises about killing off the parent of the same sex in order to have the other parent all to themselves. When the child realises that they are not powerful enough to confront this parent in any meaningful way, they internalise these feelings, with the parent taking up residence as an adversarial force within the mind. Freud controversially focused most of his attention on the experience of sons who wish to romantically attach to the mother and kill off the father. Therefore, his superego is often tinged with paternal clichés, as a dominating voice that judges, controls and belittles the self. Additionally, Freud saw this attacking, internalised figure as ricocheting through the generations, with the damning superego containing not just the most forceful elements of the parents, but also their own internalised parents. The superego therefore becomes a form of legacy in itself, cajoling and oppressing future generations to stick in line with their predecessors’ values and judgements.

When the father happens to be a cultural behemoth in the form of Soane, Judd or Freud, it is as though the superego becomes externalised. The psyche of the father is not only an internally powerful influence, but something physically present throughout the family home, filling the walls and demanding reverence and endurance. Within these homes, the domestic becomes entangled with the conceptual and intellectual, not to mention the sexual – think of Soane’s son, describing his father as a eunuch, in a precise symbolic castration. Whether the children choose to reject, preserve or advance their legacy, their homes have, to an extent, been consumed by the mind of the father.

As an intriguing counterpoint, many homes of this kind have opened themselves up for creative intervention in recent years. Artist Lina Iris Viktor’s “Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings” is running at Sir John Soane’s Museum until January 2025, with her own works shown alongside the architect’s abundant collection. The show riffs on the similarities in both of their practices – the artist has noted a strong architectural thread that runs through her abstract works and a kinship in their interest in mythology, amongst other things – while also taking a critical approach. “To his credit or not, Soane collect[ed] mostly European-based classical artworks. And obviously, the stories I’m telling are not highly Eurocentric,” Viktor said on the show’s opening. “There’s a particular historical canon that’s present in his collection, and I’m adding a whole other kind of conversation that people have far less knowledge about.”

The Freud Museum also regularly works with contemporary artists, often encouraging them to respond to Sigmund’s study: Mark Wallinger’s “Self-Reflection” (2016) saw mirrors applied to the ceiling, while Sophie Calle’s 1999 “Wedding Dress”, draped over the famous couch, was praised as “an aggressive feminine touch into the master’s masculine preserve” by critic Ralph Rugoff. These spaces, though closely controlled in their lifetime, have become more nebulous as curators and artists tackle their legacy. And perhaps this is the real trick to keeping a legacy alive and thriving sometimes centuries later: allowing it to shift and warp with the times, inviting new minds in to rearrange the tightly ordered psychic furniture. .