Dennis Severs

Diagnoses

Passions

Lifestyle

American Anglophile expatriate and museum curator whose house in Folgate Street, London is a "still-life drama" which he created as a "historical imagination" of what life would have been like inside for a family of Huguenot silk weavers. It is a Grade II listed Georgian terraced house in Spitalfields in the East End, Central London, England. From 1979 to 1999 it was lived in by Severs, who gradually recreated the rooms as a time capsule in the style of former centuries. Writer and illustrator Brian Selznick used the house as an inspiration for his 2015 novel The Marvels. The book concludes with a short history and photographs of Severs. Many of the characters names and story lines are similar to the museum. Writer Jeanette Winterson, who also restored a derelict house nearby to live in, observed, "Fashions come and go, but there are permanencies, vulnerable but not forgotten, that Dennis sought to communicate". Painter David Hockney described the house as one of the world's greatest works of opera. Severs bequeathed the house to the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, an architectural preservation charity, shortly before his death. He died on 27 December 1999 at age 51 from cancer [1]. Dennis Severs' House is now open to the public. Link to Wikipedia biography