New Architecture Writers presents Housewarming: an evening of live interviews at Van Gogh House on House Museums and the way they helps us to think about what it means to be at home today.

What do the objects in your home say about you?

In house museums they are preserved as arranged at the moment of their owner’s departure, a domestic time capsule that offers a glimpse into the lives of those who once inhabited it. A place – frozen in time – promising access to personalities through their belongings.

Van Gogh lived in Lambeth in 1873, in a house now dedicated to him (with the blue plaque to prove it). Yet he stayed for only a year and, as an unknown, 20-year-old lodger, left nothing behind. The artist’s transient relationship with the building is much like many people’s housing situations in London today, and it complicates how we think about the house museum.

Are these institutions monuments to the famous dead, sustaining myths of individual genius – or places to question such ideas? Could the house museum help us to think about what it means to be at home today?

The eighth cohort of New Architecture Writers invites you to Housewarming: a reignition of the Van Gogh House in a lively evening of interviews with artist Michael McMillan, filmmaker Soudade Kaadan and curator Sasha Galitzine. Throughout the evening, these conversations will unfold across the house, inviting attendees to reconsider what it means to make the domestic public.

New Architecture Writers is an experiment in architectural pedagogy. Led by Thomas Aquilina and Tom Wilkinson with Leela Keshav, it is a free London-based programme for emerging writers of colour. NWA is partnering with Van Gogh House for their Summer 2026 event.

Eighth cohort:

Kiran Benning • Sam Elbahja • Serena Faizal • Suaad Jama • Minsung Son • Ninu Sonuga • Monzie Tan • Nyahalo Tucker • Kyiga Wilberforce

*100% of ticket sales go directly towards the running of New Architecture Writers and the next generations of the programme.

**Van Gogh House is a Grade II listed Georgian house with steep stairs and narrow passageways that unfortunately are not fully accessible to all visitors. Please visit our website for more details, and feel free to write to us in advance of your visit: vangoghhouse.co.uk/access

Van Gogh House has many stories to share. Touching on themes of migration, housing, materiality, and architecture, we work with artists and audiences to tease out new connections. The House is a key collaborator – the building has a very specific domestic interior and many narratives which artworks inhabit and interact with. We host one exhibition a year, September to December. This is the only period where the house is open 5 days a week and visitors can freely wander through the building. For the first three quarters of the year, Van Gogh House is a space for residencies, with the last weekend of each month open for house tours and workshops. 

Otherwise known as 87 Hackford Road, the end of terrace house is a privately owned Grade II listed Georgian residential building in Stockwell. It gains its name from its most famous tenant, the painter Vincent Van Gogh, who lived there aged 20 for a year from 1873-74 whilst he worked as an art dealer in Covent Garden. In 1971, local postman and painter Paul Chalcroft undertook extensive research and discovered that the house had been Van Gogh’s London home.

The house was semi-derelict when the Wang family acquired it in 2012, with the ambition of transforming it into a cultural venue. A 7-year restoration project completed in 2019 led by Creative Director Livia Wang has established 87 Hackford Road as a new centre for the production and presentation of contemporary art, and a working domestic space sensitive to the history and heritage of the building. The house now holds an archive of over 200 artefacts found during the 7-year conservation of the building.