please empty your brain below
If they ever get round to it, combining this with Eltham Palace would be a great day.
I only had one suggested improvement, which applies to a number of National Trust places.
You only do soup and cake in the cafe? Please please can I have a sandwich?
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/The_Red_House.html
There are a lot more than five rooms that should be on view, so shame on you NT for using them as storerooms or offices or being slow to open them up, or whatever!
I took a very substandard picture of it, which is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiredoflondon/5564996509
According to the staff, the dots on the ceiling were put there during construction to guide the painters when they were painting Morris' planned designs on the ceiling (the dots would help them to make the design very uniform, like following a pattern or pencil sketch, and if they wanted to change the design later, the dots were multi-purpose and could have nearly any repetitive design laid out upon them, like graph paper can). The main ceilings apparently were not left unfinished like some of them appear today (just white with dots), but were painted with various designs when the Morris' lived there.
I had seen its National Trust entry for years, and always thought that it looked a bit bland, so never went out that way.
However, I had an unexpected free afternoon on the second day of the 2011 English Heritage Weekend and Red House was the only place taking part that I had some interest in seeing and which I could get to with public transportation while it was still open (leaving about an hour to see it).
I only had a short time there, but it was lovely, much better than I expected (though I had low expectations). In the last half hour especially, it was just me and a couple in the property, and I got lots of photos and had time to quietly get the feel of the place. I was disappointed that the original kitchen is now gone, replaced by the shop and the cafe's little kitchen, and of course the other bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs would have been interesting to see.
The guides were informative (one of them had been the housekeeper for the family who owned the house for something like 30 years before the National Trust took over, and apparently she brings a handsome bouquet every week for the table at the bottom of the stairwell) and enthused about the property, and I didn't get into trouble with them when my very first photos with my new mobile were shooting off with flash in the first room (the darkened room with original Morris wallpapers on display, cough) even though I honestly thought I'd turned the flash off.
It was free during the Heritage weekend, but I probably would have felt okay about paying the entrance fee (7 or so pounds?) for it -- once, but I wouldn't go back a second time at that price. (Unless I were a Morris fanatic or something.)
Two years ago, on the internet I had seen the 10 minute documentary about it (partly produced by the National Trust, I think), so I had some knowledge of the place. It's worth watching ahead of time, especially if you will be visiting during the time period when there is no guided tour.
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