From House to Home: Reinterpreting Dumbarton House May 20, 2011

How does the staff at a historic house museum determine how to accurately reflect the house as it was really lived in by its early residents? This museum-wide exhibition will show how this and other such questions are answered through a discovery of the house's own interior clues, in concert with images and resources from the past that show custom and practice in similar homes of the period, as well as primary resources such as residents' letters and possessions. Please join others in viewing how the house, with its longtime collection and display of lovely 1790s-1830s decorative arts in a grand space, is being changed - reinterpreted - to reflect actual use by its circa 1800 first residents as a fine, practical and simplified Federal period home.