Dorich House

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Artist’s house–museum designed and built for sculptor Dora Gordine and her husband, the Russian-art scholar Richard Hare. Completed in the mid-1930s as a live–work complex, it combines double-height studios with domestic rooms and now holds the largest public collection of Gordine’s sculpture, drawings and maquettes, alongside a notable collection of Russian Imperial and early 20th-century decorative art assembled by Hare.

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Opening Hours

Thursday: 11:00 – 16:30

Friday: 11:00 – 16:30

Saturday: 11:00 – 16:30

What's not to miss inside?

Sculpture Studios & Galleries

Shows Gordine’s working scale—from maquettes and portrait heads to completed bronzes—inside the spaces they were conceived for.

Tool marks, plaster studies and successive casts reveal how Gordine built form from quick clay sketches to refined bronze.

Pick one portrait head and trace its iterations (drawing → clay → plaster → bronze) to spot changes in pose and surface.

📍 Ground and first floors

Russian Art Collection

A compact survey of Russian Imperial and early 20th-century objects reflecting Hare’s scholarship and the couple’s collecting taste.

Icons, enamel and decorative wares chart court style, religious craftsmanship and modern tastes in exile.

Compare one Imperial-era piece with a later émigré object and note what changes—materials, motifs, maker’s marks.

📍 Dedicated rooms off the studio suite

Architecture of Making

The house itself (c.1935–36) is the key exhibit: modern, light-hungry studios stacked above domestic rooms, with a roof terrace orientated to sky and park.

‘Dorich’ fuses the couple’s names (DOr(a)+RICH(ard)) and lives—workflows, storage, and light are built in as design drivers.

Stand at the north-lit studio windows and note how clerestories and double-height volumes keep modelling light consistent.

📍 Throughout; best read from entrance to roof

🤓 Fun Facts

The name ‘Dorich’ is a portmanteau of Dora (Gordine) and Richard (Hare), reflecting the house’s purpose as a shared home–studio.

Built in 1935–36 to Gordine’s design, the house is Grade II listed as a rare surviving purpose-built sculptor’s studio-home from the interwar period.

Dorich House holds the largest public collection of Dora Gordine’s work, spanning early Paris and Southeast Asian periods through her London portrait commissions.

After Gordine’s death in 1991, the property was acquired and restored by Kingston University, reopening as a museum dedicated to her art and the couple’s Russian collection.