A Show About Home, in a Building Named After the Woman Who Made It One

Art · London

Reading time: 8 min

Cecil Thomas named the house after his wife when she died, set up a trust to protect it, and left it to the sculptors. Fifty years on, the Royal Society of Sculptors has asked Henry Holland to curate an exhibition about home, and is converting the basement back into a flat while it runs.

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There’s No Place Like It opens at Dora House, 108 Old Brompton Road, on 19 September 2026 and runs to 28 November. It is the Royal Society of Sculptors’ 2026 Summer Show, curated by the British designer Henry Holland, and it brings together work by 52 members of the Society across textiles, glass, ceramics and bronze. Entry is free.

It marks fifty years at Dora House, and it coincides with the completion of a capital project called Creating a Home for Sculptors, which has turned the building’s previously derelict basement into a self-contained flat and flexible studio for visiting artists, alongside a new home for the Society’s archive.

Put those three things together and the exhibition stops being a theme and becomes a description of the building it is in.

The house is named after a person, not a place

The sculptor Cecil Thomas took the building on in 1919, worked there, and made it a family home with his wife Dora and their son Anthony. Dora died in 1967. Thomas, who loved the house and had carefully restored its front elevation, set up the Dora Charitable Trust in her name, to protect the long-term future of the building and to carry out the family’s intention that the house and studio should pass to the sculptors. He died in 1976, and it has been the Society’s home ever since.

So an exhibition about home is being staged in a house that carries the name of the woman who made it one, given away by the man who could not keep living in it without her. Nothing in the curation needs to point at that. It is simply the address.

The architecture has its own sequence of domestic lives. The building went up in 1820 as one of a pair of semi-detached villas. Its ornate frontage dates from a remodelling of 1885 to 1886, carried out to provide a grand studio for the Court photographers Elliot and Fry: red brick, a pair of steep curved gables, classical detailing in stone in the Flemish manner and tall leaded light windows across three floors.

Villa, then photographic studio, then a sculptor’s house, then a society’s headquarters, and now, in 2026, a flat again. The capital project is not a refurbishment so much as the building returning to something it has been before.

Why Henry Holland is the right curator for it

Holland moved from fashion and his label House of Holland to ceramics, founding Henry Holland Studio in 2020. The studio works in a modern interpretation of nerikomi, the Japanese technique of building objects from meticulously layered coloured clays, hand-built rather than thrown, so that the pattern runs through the body of the piece rather than sitting on its surface.

The studio’s own stated position is that it wants to “embrace the wobble”, celebrating the beauty of individual craftsmanship rather than correcting it out. A curator whose practice is built on accepting the irregularity has been handed a subject where irregularity is the whole point, because nobody’s home is symmetrical, finished or entirely intentional either.

Caroline Worthington, Director of the Royal Society of Sculptors, frames the appointment in terms of range. “He brings a great eye for design alongside a profound understanding of creating sculptural objects,” she says. “Henry’s theme, There’s No Place Like It, beautifully echoes our Year of the Home celebrations as we mark 50 years at Dora House.”

What is in the rooms

The show surveys home across its full range, from sanctuary to routine. Philippa Beveridge‘s Lost and Found (2025) is a set of cast glass purses holding personal items, family photographs and small mementos, which makes the container transparent and the contents the subject. Michael Coombs‘s Chair (2025) is draped clothing moulded into the shape of a seat, an illusion that only works because everyone knows what a chair feels like.

Daily ritual gets two very different readings. Annie Edwards‘s A Clean House is a Happy House (2026) animates a dustpan and brush to make a joke of the endlessness of housework. Poojan Gupta‘s When Ordinary Becomes Sacral stitches together prescription blister packs, elevating a mundane object by pointing at the role it plays during illness and recovery.

Pets carry a surprising amount of the domestic weight, through Dido Crosby‘s Staffie (2016) and Nick Hornby‘s Dear Dashy Dash ii (2020). And Abigail Norris‘s Symbiont (2020) finds the most precise image in the show: exuberant tufts of yak hair caught in a hairbrush, the intimate residue of living alongside another creature. Victoria Ferrand Scott‘s surreal, distorted teapot Make Tea Not War (2025) is the domestic object at its most argumentative.

Fifty years, and the money behind them

The Society was established in 1905 and is artist-led and membership-based. Dora House has hosted more than a hundred exhibitions since 1976. In 2022 the Society raised £1 million to fund the first phase of restoration, and it has since sought a further million to convert the damp, unusable basement into the one-bedroom flat and studio that opens with this show.

The exhibition is supported by Hallett Independent, with Apollo as media partner and the Marsh Charitable Trust funding the annual Summer Show Award.

It is a fifteen minute walk from the rest of Brompton Design District, and it repays the journey by being the only project in the programme whose subject and whose building are the same thing. It pairs naturally with Our Parlour, the district’s other exhibition built from the memory of a front room, and with shows where the room itself is doing the arguing.

Practical note: it opens on 19 September, near the end of the festival, and runs until 28 November. It is the one project here you can still see in a fortnight’s time, which makes it the sensible thing to leave until last.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Fifty two sculptors answering the question of what home means would be a good exhibition in any building. In this one it is something closer to an argument the house has been making on its own since 1919, through a photographer’s studio, a family, a bequest and a basement that is about to become a flat again.

Henry Holland’s own work is built on letting the hand show and the form wobble, which is a useful sensibility to bring to a subject nobody has ever got symmetrical. It is the last of the district’s projects to open and the only one still standing in November.