The Historic house museum: shrine, exemplar, gallery, fantasy, history?

This grant application begins a large project to produce a book on the historic house as a species of museum. It develops work on Australian house museums undertaken with a URG in 1993-4, in established the same kind of databases for US and English house museums. From the databases, it takes the novel step of analysing house museums in categories: shrines to great persons, design exemplars, collectors' collections in situ, nostalgic fantasy sites, and social history displays. These differentiations enable consideration of the history, habits, constraints and potential of a hugely popular, but very expensive, type of heritage resource.