In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction that provides clues to their personality.

This assignment was prompted by Laura Freeman’s reference in a Spectator article
to ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in 1932. In it she describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, observing: ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’

Entries that impressed and amused me included Nick MacKinnon’s J.G. Ballard: ‘The house on its traffic island clings like a Velcro cuff around a flyover pillar, as if assessing the systolic pressure in the concrete aorta above…’ And Janine Beacham’s Falstaff: ‘Located near the Boar’s Head Inn at Windsor, it features poor overall maintenance with cracked, peeling and dirty surfaces, but also offers an impressive bar, overhanging balcony, well-used bedrooms, a vast entertainment area, and a surprisingly capacious laundry basket…’

The winners, printed below, scoop £30.

The house, ‘Superego’, is difficult to find, hidden away behind trees, down several winding lanes, some apparently leading off in different directions. But once its whereabouts are established, it proves to be an imposing erection, with an enormous totem-pole rearing up in front of the wide portal. Inside the house there are innumerable small rooms, many of them locked, and the casual visitor is likely to discover a door which, on being prised open with difficulty, turns out to be a deep and twisting cupboard containing, perhaps, a child’s cot, nine clocks, and a set of fish-knives. One otherwise empty room has a single large wardrobe full of fur coats, but alas without access to Narnia, though this room is said to have inspired C.S. Lewis. There are very many lavatories, not all of which flush. The imposing salon contains only one painting, an enormous portrait of Sigmund’s mother.

Brian Murdoch/Sigmund Freud

Nothing is quite as it seems in this fairy tale residence. A mock Tudorbethan façade conceals a Regency-style interior, with reproduction furniture upholstered in faux-leather and imitation velveteen.

Apart from a trompe l’oeil mural, the walls are adorned with an array of prints (no originals) and stereotypes, as well as a number of trophies and other memorabilia, including an England Test cap and a framed citation for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A study space, complete with mahogany-effect desk, shows evidence of recent activity: a sheaf of papers cut and ready for pasting under a fool’s gold paperweight.

The garden too is rich with borrowings, planted with non-native species and featuring a ha-ha and an imposing folly. We return to the house via a new extension (planning permission retrospectively sought) with a utility room (all mod cons) and a lavatory. Here, at any rate, the plumbing is frank.

David Shields/Jeffrey Archer

The high windows, inch-thick, are hard to see into, or out of; yet the curtains are old-fashioned in a jazzy way. In the small, unsatisfactory hall, a slightly outmoded shoe-rack. In the sitting-room, a chair, a table, a stereogram, a lamp, an electric fire (two bars), books and china, coal in a sudden scuttle, a piano stool. Depending from a hook, two long coats. In the kitchen, where nothing is going on, the hum of a Frigidaire, and beyond it a deepening shelf, with a vase, and other souvenirs. On a work surface, a set of knives, sharp, very cutting, potentially lethal. In a cupboard, behind glass: meringues, a bottle of washing sherry, unbroken eggs, tinned sardines. In the bedroom, a plain wardrobe, red blankets on the slightly fusty bed, hot cushions. In the tidy garden glimpsed from the bedroom, a long slide.

Bill Greenwell/Philip Larkin

Pass through a creaking gate and up the garden path, which is a long and very winding one, often doubling and redoubling back on itself, until you come to an odd, rambling building of three storeys in different styles, none of them quite complete. Above the entrance, an escutcheon bears the owner’s coat of arms comprising a cock and a bull, the bull couchant aslant, the cock rampant. A motto beneath reads ‘Vita brevis, fabula longa’.

Prominent in the hallway is a large grandfather clock looking much like any other until you notice that the hour hand is advancing but the minute one is ticking backwards. Beside the clock on a small table is a wooden box containing the winding key and a torn birth certificate. On the opposite wall is an elaborate picture frame with the inscription, ‘Trismegistus Sh*ndy’. But the canvas is entirely black.

W.J. Webster/Tristram Shandy o.c.

X marks the eXtensive home of Elon Musk. An eXtraordinary residence in an eXclusive neighbourhood, crafted in an eXtravagant manner with infinite spaceX for eXpansion beyond its current level of 280 rooms. It’s eXpensively finished, an eXample of luXurious multipleX living characterised by a range of eXhilarating amenities and eXpressive features in an eXciting compleX that was once an outline anneX. Powered by the sun, the residence runs on eXotic batteries with no eXpiration dates. The luXury home indeX ranks this home the most eXceptionally uninhibited and eXpansive in the world, truly an eXperiment in fleXible eXpressionism, the apeX of domestic cosmic eXcess. There are some eXtra security features, including quirky privacy settings and unique codes guaranteeing eXemption from mass eXtinction. Xanadu is truly eXceptional, way beyond compare.

John O’Byrne/Elon Musk

No. 3322: Mind the gap

You are invited to submit a poem reflecting on the fate of the Sycamore Gap tree. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 18 October.