Real Rooms. Museum of the Home.

For the last two years I have had the prividege to work with the Museum of the home, Hackney on their real rooms project. Exerpt from the museum of the home website.

It’s been a pleasure to work with some amazing artists and designers to explore queer migration and homemaking during the process. With thanks to michael mcmillan, zmma, interaction research studio and FUMo Studio.

’There are many stories and voices missing from our Rooms Through Time. We want to work with our visitors and communities to understand what the rooms could look like if we were to rethink who they are about.’

‘After a 3 year closure, the Museum reopened in 2021 as the Museum of the Home – a place to reveal and rethink how we live, in order to live better together. The Museum’s interpretation focuses on diverse personal stories that create a relatable visitor experience for all.

The new Home Galleries embody this new approach, with displays that are representative of many of our local communities, and aim to explore the innumerable different ways in which we make our lives in our homes. 

During this project, while the Rooms Through Time received new interpretation that helped bring the rooms to life for visitors, the curatorial team were restricted in the stories they could tell by both the architecture of the sets and the makeup of the collections, which predominantly represent the white middle classes households.

Therefore, not only do these displays jar with the far more diverse Home Galleries below, they no longer fulfill our aims as an organisation, nor represent the complex histories of migration and identity that have shaped Britain for hundreds of years.’

About the project.

The Real Rooms project will tackle this imbalance by introducing a far more diverse array of narratives using co-creative and co-curatorial methods to let the communities we are representing tell us how they think their histories should be told.

Personal stories are our lifeblood

The new period rooms will centre on personal stories, and will take inspiration from oral histories and the lived experience of the communities they represent.

Everyone has an idea of what home means to them

The displays will be able to tell a far wider range of stories and experiences of home than we have ever previously attempted.

Design is important, but it has to be lived

The design and architecture on display in these rooms will always serve the exploration of the lived experience first and foremost. Moreover, these rooms will have a properly ‘lived-in’ feel, showing how people really live as opposed to ideal room sets.

Everyone can learn something here

We are not only telling new and more histories, we are also diversifying the way we tell these stories. Child-focused interpretation and an emphasis on interactive and experiential history will ensure that all audiences will be able to discover something new.

Our East London location inspires us

Many of the stories we are telling with the new rooms will be hyper-local, exploring the diverse communities that have called the area home over the centuries.

Home is constantly evolving and so are we

The new rooms will be designed with flexibility in mind, to enable new stories to be told whenever needed. The Room of the Future will also explore how our homes may continue to evolve. 

Our visitors feel at home

By drastically increasing the diversity of histories on display, we hope that all visitors will find something they identify with their feelings of home. We will domesticate the visitor spaces, making them more inviting and making visitors more comfortable.