House of Dreams Museum

#165

Artist Stephen Wright has transformed his South London home into a total-environment artwork—walls, floors, garden and furniture become a continuous mosaic and assemblage. It’s outsider art in the European tradition of handcrafted ‘visionary houses’: intensely autobiographical, saturated with colour and text, and built from years of found objects reimagined as sculpture.

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Opening Hours

Daily: 09:30 – 17:00

What's not to miss inside?

Façade & Garden Totems

Architecture becomes sculpture: bottle-tops, crockery, mirrors and dolls fuse into dense mosaics and vertical ‘totems’.

Found materials are treated like a painter’s palette—colour fields and repeating motifs guide your eye across the surfaces.

Pick one repeating object (e.g., a toy head or plate shard) and trace how it reappears from gate to doorstep to garden.

📍 Front exterior and small garden

Diary Rooms

Text panels and hand-lettered plaques act as a personal diary, turning memory and grief into part of the installation.

Words are used as materials—phrases and names are embedded into the décor like tiles.

Read one wall from left to right as if it were a poem; note how colour and objects ‘punctuate’ the lines.

📍 Ground-floor interiors

Assemblage Altars

Shrine-like clusters mix toys, photographs and ornaments into intimate memorials.

Everyday bric-à-brac is re-coded as relic; the display language nods to folk devotional traditions.

Look for repetition (eyes, hands, hearts); ask what emotion each cluster is staging.

📍 Stairwell and room corners

Pattern & Textile Eye

Wright’s background in textiles informs the rhythm of pattern, edging and colour blocking across rooms.

Borders and trims behave like fabric selvedges, containing riotous surfaces inside crisp frames.

Find a border motif and see how it ‘seams’ two materials together—ceramic to mirror, text to image.

📍 Throughout—surfaces and trims

🤓 Fun Facts

The house is conceived as a single artwork (a ‘visionary environment’): the architectural shell and the collection are inseparable.

Materials are overwhelmingly reclaimed—broken ceramics, plastic toys, dentures, bottle caps, mirrors—chosen for colour, texture and biography rather than monetary value.

Text is integral to the collection: hand-lettered plaques and ‘memory boards’ record people, places and dates, so writing functions as an exhibit medium, not just a label.