Badge Art and Design Blog

Artist's mosaic makeover gives neighbours an eyeful

Flying eyeballs and hula girls are currently adorning the exterior of one London home - anyone else feel inspired?

Outsider art ... one of the mosaics on the exterior of The Treatment Rooms. Photograph:

There's a plaque outside a small semi-detached house in a quiet street in west London. It's slightly different to your average English Heritage number. It reads, "English Hedonists. The Treatment Rooms 2002-Now. Lots of People lived here and partied hard." The sign is surrounded by elaborate, mosaic art work depicting hula girls, tiki totem poles, flying eyeballs and deranged skeletons. Toy baby heads are embedded in nearby walls with the words "Turner Prize Reject".

The Treatment Rooms in Chiswick used to be an ordinary domestic home which has been transformed by founder Baroness von Reichardt over the past eight years into a colourful public art piece.

Many outsider artists have made their homes into living works of art in the past. Places such as Howard Finster's Paradise Garden in Georgia, Nek Chand's Rock Garden in India or Factuer Cheval's Palais Ideal in France. These eccentric museums that grew out of a domestic context are often described as the work of the obsessed or the delightfully strange. It's just not something you see in your usual London suburb.

The joy of turning your house into a living art work means self expression is guaranteed. While bland DIY fills the media, outsider homes present a truly original alternative. As von Reichardt noted in this illuminating interview with The Londonist blog: "I liked the idea that on this quaint little street in Chiswick something as incongruous as a house completely covered in mosaic art might exist."

This art-home is the antithesis of keeping up with the Joneses and the current home-as-investment argument.

Von Reichardt acknowledges a debt to graffiti, and one wall resembles a mosaic interpretation of a graffiti piece. There is a sense of rebellion and personal expression here - even if stylistically the home may not appeal to all. Like all outsider art, it proposes a positive alternative from the "art as product" construct that dominates the contemporary art world. As one mosaic text piece notes: "You gotta fight for your right to be arty". But do you like it? And would you ever consider adorning your home in such a way?

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