Hendrix Home Opens to Public

The London apartment Jimi Hendrix once called “my first real home of my own” will be put on exhibit for the first time this summer to mark the 40th anniversary of the guitarist’s death.

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In 1968 and 1969, Hendrix lived on the top floor of a three-story brick flat in London’s swank Mayfair district. Classical composer George Federic Handel lived next door two centuries earlier, and the apartment operated as the Handel museum office space until this summer, when staff will empty the space and fill it with Hendrix artifacts borrowed from Seattle’s Experience Music Project. The room has the same wood-chipped wallpaper as when Hendrix occupied it, which museum director Sarah Bardwell fondly calls”that really disgusting wallpaper that used to be cool in the Sixties.”

Expect to see Hendrix’s handwritten directions to the Isle of Wight he scrawled on the back of a map, an orange velvet stage jacket, and the original written lyrics of psychedelic classics “Stepping Stone” and “Love or Confusion” on display at the home. “It will be a blank space but it will allow your imagination to run wild thinking about what Hendrix did here,” Bardwell tells Rolling Stone. “Serious Hendrix fans are awed by the experience. They get a real good sense of Hendrix spending time here.”