Keats House
Showcase design | Bespoke furniture
Saved from demolition in 1920 and now in the care of the City of London Corporation, Keats House is a Regency villa in Hampstead where the poet John Keats lived for a brief but significant time before his early death at the age of 25. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his stay at the house, we were asked to design a display case for the temporary exhibition of just one single item - his original, handwritten draft of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
An unusual part of the brief was that the display case was to be integrated within a piece of bespoke furniture that could sit happily within the building’s period furnishings. To meet performance considerations, the case we specified was an all-glass, top-hinged high-security laminated glass vitrine, with concealed locks in the underside of the case, and the facility for discrete access ta a desiccant compartment for relative humidity control.
The display case was fitted within a representation of a Georgian writing desk in ebony stained poplar wood with leather inlay, built by specialist joinery makers. Beneath the writing table a movement-activated recording of a quill scratching on paper was concealed, to create the illusion that the poet was in the room.
The exhibition ran for a short time and the manuscript now resides at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; however, because of the exacting specifications for secure case construction, and how well the design complemented its Georgian context, the table-top case has since accommodated many items from other lending museums.