The Spitalfields festival always puts emphasis on discovering new places, but few venues will be as intimate as those chosen by the early-music choral group the Sixteen. Hemmed in by Banglatown and Spitalfields market is a grid of unassuming houses that were home to London's Huguenot silk weavers. Each has a front room into which you could cram a thriving exiled 18th-century family – or, say, two musicians and a dozen listeners.

Groups of audience members moved from house to house, up wonky staircases, past family photos and eccentric art collections, to rooms where members of the Sixteen performed lute songs, medieval airs and viol music. The budgies in Polly Hope's art studio had chirruped their accompaniment to two male-voice trios by Henry VIII (a not-bad dilettante composer) four times before we all converged there for the final set of pieces by John Dowland, involving all eight musicians.

Hearing Julie Cooper singing in medieval English in a silk-wallpapered drawing room, or admiring the Bachian counterpoint of a Dowland lute solo while the sound of car horns drifted in through the window – none of this seemed especially incongruous given the quirkiness of the occasion. This was an experience that was informal, memorable and absolutely rooted in its place.

The festival continues until 26 June. Box office: 020-7377 1362.