House Museums

Abstract

House museums are dwellings that are museumized and account for 10 to 15 percent of all museums around the world. Their location, design, construction, and size are often informed by various sociopolitical factors related to issues of class, race, and gender. House museums are a particular subset or “species” within the museum taxonomy, which includes art galleries, natural history and ethnographic museums, history museums, gardens, and zoos. They operate as residential structures preserved, restored, or rehabilitated as public institutions to represent and interpret for the visiting public a particular period. Their institutionalization is informed by strategic decision-making processes. Upon selection for museumification, they are then preserved, conserved, or restored and subsequently staffed by managers, historians, curators, interpreters, and trained volunteers who draw on extensive and meticulous historical research to validate the respective house museum’s institutional authority for the public. Museumized houses function to entice, receive, and engage visitors. House museum visits offer visitors encounters with a particular place and time in what Bennett 1995 (cited under Introduction: Museums) refers to as an “exhibitionary complex.” House museums offer immersive contexts, furnished period room displays in situ to portray “household values.” House museums deploy the lens of domesticity with period rooms, furnishings, and guided tour routes to showcase historic routines and practices in the past and, by extension, make abstract concepts, such as the nation, collective and/or individual identity, and/or the primary characteristics of the locality associated with the shelter’s historical functions known and/or familiar to visitors. House museums first appeared in the world’s cultural landscape in the 1830s in both Europe and the United States, enshrining major political, literary, and society figures and their households. See also Mandler 1997 cited under House Museums, Critical Literature. The opening up of stately country houses in Britain to visitors provided entry to all into the trappings of aristocratic culture, setting the trend for the museumification of Great Houses, including American presidents’ houses, writers’ dwellings, collectors’ residences, plantation museums, and the like. The formation of folk, open-air, and “living history” museums, such as the 1891 opening of Skansen—a seventy-five-acre outdoor museum staffed with period costumed guides, farm animals, musicians, and folk dancers in Stockholm, Sweden, brought about a wider awareness of vernacular housing. The work of social historians, social justice advocates, and community groups from the 1980s onward have fostered the addition of tenement housing, industrial barracks, and cottages to the house museum movement. Not all houses, however, are home.