Sonia Solicari unpacks her new book Real Rooms and how museums represent the home
Real Rooms: Creating, Recreating and Visiting Home is a new book from Lund Humphries which examines how the concept of ‘home’ is explained in museums. To mark its publication, we’ve asked museum and culture writer Maxwell Blowfield — aka maxwell museums — to speak to author Sonia Solicari to hear more about why this book is long overdue...
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This January, Sonia Solicari will mark a decade leading the Museum of the Home. Formerly the Geffrye Museum, it’s an unusual but much-loved venue in London’s East End which through its displays tries to understand the buildings we live in.
I did a very short stint on a work placement at the museum back in 2012, and even back then I could see that its quirky ‘roomsets’ — recreations of typical London homes through the centuries — were trying to do something almost impossible. Namely: capture a universal snapshot of a ‘home’ when it’s a concept that is so deeply personal. Yes, that’s a typical 1830s Drawing Room you can see, but even 200 years ago no two people would have experienced a room like that the same. Everyone’s home throughout history is unique.
The museum has changed a lot since then, with a rebrand to its current name and an expansion and overhaul to include roomsets that are not merely historical vignettes, but spaces in which to interrogate these much broader themes of what ‘home’ is.
So when Lund Humphries asked me to speak to Sonia about her brand new book which aims to unpack how museums — including her own — display and represent our domestic settings, I jumped at the chance.
Here we discuss why a book like Real Rooms is overdue, why former houses make such great museums, and how representing ‘home’ in a museum setting can help us understand the most pressing issues of our day.
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Hi Sonia. So firstly, what does ‘home’ mean to you?
For me home is nebulous, intangible, constantly shifting. I think this has come about through years of thinking intensely about a concept which I thought I understood, but on which I’m constantly being challenged. For better or worse, my work has fundamentally unsettled my idea of home.
I used to imagine home as a retreat from the world. But it is increasingly difficult to sustain that idea — it feels that home is more porous, more precarious and less fixed than ever before but in that instability lies possibility.
You’re the director of London’s Museum of the Home. Why does the concept of ‘home’ have its own museum?
Many museums explore aspects of home, but as far as we know, we are the only self-styled museum of the ‘home’ in the world. We explore it as an emotional, psychological, socio-political and economic space, as well as a physical one.
We believe that the concept of home is pivotal to understanding and solving many of the most challenging issues facing the world today — from the climate crisis to homelessness. We take everyday life seriously, preserve moments of joy and difficult memories and strive to recognise a fundamental part of ourselves.
Since rebranding in 2019 (we were previously the Geffrye Museum) and reimagining our galleries and programme, we’ve doubled visitor numbers. Visitors are responding well to the theme of home in its broadest sense and they contribute a lot to our evolving content.
But home is such a personal, individual experience. And one’s ‘home’ is rarely ever seen by more than a handful of people. So how have you translated that into a universal display at your museum?
Museum of the Home is a practice-based, issues-focused museum and we believe that the power of creating a roomset is more than the sum of its parts.
We thought carefully about this for our most recent gallery development, where we unveiled seven new rooms for visitors, ranging from the 1870s to the future. These are seven new stories of home and seven different models of co-creation with community groups, artists and academics. Each room is based on an amalgamation of lived experiences and archival evidence to get as close as possible to a shared idea or memory.
For example, ‘A Front Room in 1979’ has been created by the artist Michael McMillan through memories from his own childhood growing up in Dalston. But he taps into wider experiences — of the family politics around the use of the ‘front room’; the home as a sanctuary from racism on the streets; the role of migration; the wider economies that enable people to make and keep home.
Every object placed in one of the museum’s roomsets holds personal memories and is a gateway to wider, sometimes global issues.
What’s also clear from your book is just how many museums are former ‘homes’ — such as Sir John Soane's Museum, Anne Frank’s House, many National Trust properties. Why are there so many, and why do they make for good museum experiences?
House museums are among the most vivid and engaging parts of the heritage landscape, because they are where a real person actually lived.
But even within this type of museum, each offers radically different experiences. Some celebrate art and design while others invite a kind of pilgrimage, bringing visitors closer to a famous former inhabitant. Some house museums overflow with furniture and objects; others are defined by absence. At Anne Frank’s House, the emptiness creates meaning.
One of my favourite experiences while writing the book was visiting 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan Thomas’s childhood home in Swansea. You can stay overnight and lie in a bed positioned as his would have been, gazing out of the same window as the young poet which is a view that inspired one of his poems.
And so is a book like Real Rooms overdue?
It’s overdue as a tribute to the curators, conservators, interpreters, artists, communities, visitors and funders who keep these spaces alive and continually rethink what it means to create and recreate home.
I wanted to explore why home holds such a grip on our cultural imagination — what this deep fascination reveals, and how museums and heritage sites can harness it to create meaningful engagement. Everyone has a relationship with home, an idea of what it means — that’s a powerful place to start.
Anyone who has ever enjoyed a visit to a house museum or been captivated by a room set in a museum should read this book.
How did the book come together? Did you get to visit lots of museums?
The book emerged from an existential question: what does it mean to be a museum of the home, and how can we meaningfully represent such an expansive, intimate and emotionally charged subject? I began to question whether the Museum of the Home’s long-standing practice of creating roomsets remained relevant, or whether it was simply an inherited tradition.
To test these questions, I hit the road, visiting most of the sites featured in the book. I also asked friends, colleagues and museum visitors for recommendations. Almost everyone had a vivid memory of a house, room or home-related site that had stayed with them.
Selecting the case studies was inevitably also shaped by geography, time and budget. I chose to focus on permanent displays, fascinated by the challenge of creating spaces that hold relevance over time.
To complete the book, I had six weeks of sabbatical spread across a year and carved out writing time alongside the job, with huge thanks to colleagues who held the fort while I was away.
The process was, at times, anxiety-inducing. But it also gave me fresh energy, sharpened my thinking and, ultimately, made me fall in love with the Museum of the Home all over again.
What’s your favourite museum ‘home’?
The Baldizzi apartment at the Tenement Museum in New York is the only museum in which I’ve cried.
I wasn’t prepared for the experience of encountering rooms that felt so uncannily familiar — so much like my Italian grandparents’ home in Little Italy in London. It was the smallest details: the colour and texture of the paint, the arrangement of the kitchen, the worn surfaces. For a moment, I could almost smell the heady mixture of coffee, garlic and Parmesan.
The Tenement Museum explores the subject of migration with such sensitivity and care — they’re also constantly shifting and adapting the stories they tell and challenging themselves on the ethics and impact of their practice. They’re a huge inspiration.
You say the title of the book is provocative. Are museum homes real?
I really enjoyed thinking about the concepts of real, reality, realness — and authenticity and truth, especially as I was writing the book at a time when artificial intelligence began to fill more of our lives and the world was beginning to ask these kinds of questions more urgently.
Museum homes are, in my opinion, a hyper-reality — they get their intensity from being created and curated spaces that hold a mirror up to how we wish to consider our domestic selves.
At Museum of the Home we open our galleries with a swirling ephemeral immersive animation which introduces the idea of home as dreamscape — this is how I like to think about museum homes, as domestic memory spaces.
Finally, which home that exists today do you think we’ll be visiting as a museum in 100 years time?
No. 10 Downing Street. It’s both a family home and a huge national metonym.
Apparently, the building will need extensive repair and adaptation to continue to be fit for purpose as a political hub, so in the next 100 years I predict the official residence becoming something quite different and the existing No.10 preserved as a house museum.
It’ll be fascinating to explore a home that has had so many public moments of moving-in and eviction. We all know that front door so well but, as with most homes, surely we all really want to see the bedrooms and the bathrooms?
Buy your copy of Real Rooms HERE
Maxwell Blowfield covers the art and museum sectors in his popular Substack newsletter maxwell museums, and at maxwellmuseums.com
Images:
View of Rooms Through Time Galleries & A Front Room in 1979, both at Museum of The Home. Courtesy of Jaron James and Museum of The Home, London.
