House of Dreams Museum
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.
Opening Hours
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.
📍 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.
📍 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.
📍 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.
📍 Throughout—surfaces and trims
Inspire your Friends
- 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.
