David Bowie at Home: 10 Photos of the Rock Legend Off-Duty

He wrote songs about space exploration, but David Bowie was a master of time travel, bringing the future of music, style, and culture to an astonished public. He was a postwar baby; born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947, the young Bowie grew up in London’s Bromley borough playing in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. As a budding musician, he performed in a series of 1950s rock-and-roll bands before going solo as David Bowie, naming himself for what he told Rolling Stone was the ultimate American knife.

Not just a rock star but an entire galaxy unto himself, Bowie became a singular force in glam rock, electronic and ambient sounds, dance pop, art rock, and gender-bending fashion. By the time of his death from liver cancer in 2016, he had become a rock icon, worked as an actor, married twice (the second time to supermodel Iman), and raised two children. And he did it all from crumbling British Victorians, chic New York apartments, and an island getaway in Mustique.

Read on to see the artist at home in the 1960s and ’70s, with his distinctive gaze always set on the future.

Music man

When this photo was taken in 1966, Bowie was still living at his parents’ home in Bromley, London. The Heritage of London Trust’s Proud Places program aims to turn the icon’s childhood residence into a museum called Bowie’s House in 2027, preserving the site where, as their website says, “before there was a global superstar, there was a bedroom where a teenager listened to Little Richard records and felt the first shock of possibility.” The rising star would move into manager Ken Pitt’s apartment in 1967.

Jones no more

According to The Pitt Report, Pitt’s book about Bowie, the young rocker moved into his flat during the summer of 1967 because his parents’ home had become too crowded. “On Sunday, June 11, Mr. Jones drove David and his belongings up from Bromley,” Pitt wrote. “After his father had gone, David said, ‘Dad liked the flat. He said it’s very masculine.’” Between 1967 and 1968, Bowie would stay at Pitt’s top-floor residence in a Georgian terraced house, which was often used for photo shoots with musicians.

It was Pitt who suggested that the aspiring musician change his name from David Jones to avoid confusion with Davy Jones, who rose to fame playing the Artful Dodger in the musical Oliver! on the London stage before bringing the role to Broadway and eventually joining the Monkees.

Home work

It wouldn’t be until 1972 that Bowie would release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, introducing his alter ego, an alien rock star visiting Earth. In this 1966 photo of the musician and his instrument, with glam rock still in the future, one of its superstars is still firmly surrounded by mod, mid-1960s fixtures including his skinny tie and massive ashtray.

Man on the moon

In late 1969, Bowie and then girlfriend Angie Barnett moved into the ground floor of Haddon Hall, a historic home on South London’s 42 Southend Road. The Beckenham building was made of Victorian brick and boasted a handful of architectural flourishes, including a prominent stained-glass window. By February 1970, when this photo was taken, Bowie had suffered both a devastating personal loss (the death of his father in August 1969) and sudden professional success: After seeing the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, he wrote the song “Space Oddity” about an astronaut lost in the cosmos.

Painting the town

“The building was the epitome of crumbling magnificence,” biographer Paul Trynka wrote of Haddon Hall in Starman: David Bowie. Trynka described a staircase “dominated by a magnificent Gothic stained-glass window.” As royalties from the “Space Oddity” single started rolling in, Bowie and Barnett “became familiar figures at the antiques shops on Old Kent and Tower Bridge Roads, acquiring Art Deco lamps, William Morris screens, and mahogany chests of drawers,” per Trynka.

Cover star

Bowie wore this ensemble during a photo shoot at Haddon Hall for the cover of his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. The UK album cover shows him reclining on a blue chaise, but in the United States, Mercury Records refused to release an album featuring a man in a dress on the cover, and went with a photo of a cowboy instead. When asked by Melody Maker magazine journalist Michael Watts why he wasn’t “wearing [his] girl’s dress today” during a 1972 interview, Bowie replied, “Oh dear. You must understand that it’s not a woman’s. It’s a man’s dress.”

A family affair

Bowie and Barnett married in March 1970. They’re shown here in 1971 with a friend, unwinding in their Haddon Hall flat. The pair brought bold style to the neglected Victorian, painting the sitting room silver, the living room green, and the bedroom pink, and installing a recording studio in the basement. On May 30, 1971, their son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones was born.

Creative hub

In The Man Who Sold the World, biographer Peter Doggett described Haddon Hall as “a bohemian enclave shared with Angie, producer Tony Visconti, and assorted musicians, roadies, and associates.” The rock star’s half-brother Terry also called the space home on occasion. In her own memoir, Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie, Angie wrote, “As you might expect, Haddon Hall is a thoroughly Victorian edifice: solid red brick, ornately embellished with solemn white fasciae, and, of course righteously, haughtily church-like in basic aspect, so much so that the dominant feature of the rear face is a huge stained-glass window. The front is almost as imposing. The door opens, and the first thing you see is that magnificent stained-glass window rising above a short staircase at the far end of a central hallway fully forty feet wide by sixty feet long.”

Solo artist

Bowie spent much of 1972 and 1973 touring in the US and Japan. When his album Pin Ups hit number one in the UK in late 1973, his fame skyrocketed, with admirers camping out in front of Haddon Hall. After one managed to break into the home, Bowie and his family moved to escape the crowds, first to an apartment in Maida Vale and later to a house on Oakley Street in Chelsea. 

The decaying Haddon Hall was demolished in the 1980s and replaced with an apartment block.

The Thin White Duke looks back

Bowie moved to LA in April 1975, pursuing an acting career while continuing to record, then relocated to Berlin in 1976. He was still living in Germany in 1977 when he returned to England to promote his new album, Heroes. The musician is shown here in his home away from home, the Dorchester Hotel, where, at age 30, he reflected on finding his place in the world. “Towards the end of my stay in America, I realized that what I had to do was to experiment. To discover new forms of writing. To evolve, in fact, a new musical language. That’s what I set out to do,” he told Allan Jones during that interview. “That’s why I returned to Europe.”

Over the next 39 years, he acquired new homes in New York City (where he lived with his second wife, Iman, and their daughter Alexandria) and in the private island Mustique, where he flexed his interior-design muscles.