The living room of the Francis W. Little House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1912 and 1914 in Wayzata, Minnesota, reflects his Prairie School vision of flowing horizontality and connection to nature. The entire structure of the living room and everything within it — down to each brick — was shipped to the Metropolitan Museum and painstakingly reconstructed; it was unveiled in 1982. It is one of the few period rooms at the Met to contain nearly all of its original furnishings.
The parlor of Samuel Hart’s home, with its dark wood ceiling beams, diamond-shaped casement windows, and bedstead framed by lush red curtains, was once surrounded by orchards, gardens, and the central meeting house of colonial Ipswich, Massachusetts. Now, it sits on the third floor of the American Wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, surrounded by hordes of tourists walking up and down Fifth Avenue and the manicured lawns of Central Park. The Hart Room is the earliest period room in the American Wing, and as such, liberties have been taken to create an accurate portrait of its time: the bedstead is a reproduction based on period paintings and documents, and the stylish paneling on the fireplace wall was actually salvaged from another 17th-century home in Ipswich and was only installed in the room a few decades before the Met acquired it. All the furnishings — the lavishly carved wooden cupboard, the spindle-back armchair — are period-appropriate, but they never actually belonged to Hart. And the room itself was a reproduction when it was first unveiled in 1924 — it wasn’t until the house’s owners sold it to the museum in 1936 that actual architectural elements from the Hart house were incorporated.
The transformations of the Hart Room, and this blend of fact, fiction, reproduction, and curatorial interpretation that shaped it, are par for the course for the period rooms at the Met and for the form more broadly. An uncanniness pervades these staged settings: staircases lead to nowhere, artificial light streams through windows that abut other museum walls, and painted backdrops of parks outside these frames undermine the illusion. Ornate rooms from Ottoman Damascus, a garden echoing Ming-dynasty Suzhou, and dining rooms suited to country estates in Georgian England are all part of the museum’s collection. But there’s nothing from Africa, South America, India, Japan, or countless other countries. It’s a selective, Eurocentric, and largely bourgeois survey of decorative arts from around the world, shaped as much by curatorial taste and donor whims as by historical fact. Only the American Wing offers a fuller picture of interior history, as period rooms trace the aesthetic trends and broader cultural narratives of domestic life in the United States, from colonial Massachusetts to Frank Lloyd Wright. But this narrative is by no means comprehensive. And even though these rooms appear to be static, stage-like settings, the story told by those in the American Wing period is always in flux.
Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from the West 54th Street home of Arabella Worsham, sold fully furnished to John D. Rockefeller in 1884. The elaborate satinwood paneling, cabinetry, and furnishings were made by leading cabinetmaking firm George A. Schastey & Co., commissioned by Worsham to design the home's interior in 1881. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Richmond Room, taken from a house built in 1810–11 in Richmond, Virginia, has become central to how Met curators rethink and reinterpret the American Wing. The intricate mahogany woodwork of the parlor was only possible due to the transatlantic slave trade that supplied mahogany through the labor of enslaved people in the Caribbean and Central America. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Marmion room was taken from the principal parlor of the Fitzhugh family's plantation house in King George County, Virginia built in 1756. For its restaging, the seven-sided room was left unfurnished to foregound the room's hand-painted entablature and intricate Rococo-style ornamentation. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When the wing first opened in 1924, it marked a first on several fronts: the first major installation of colonial and early Federal American art in an urban museum, the first in a devoted wing of its kind, and the first large-scale embrace of period rooms as a curatorial strategy. The Met itself had opened in 1870 with a broad charter — the study of the fine arts and the application of the same to practical life. But by the turn of the 20th century, tastes and priorities had shifted. Folklore and historical museums in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia had already relied on this decorative arts model. And stateside, The Arts and Crafts movement, the rise of Colonial Revival architecture, and what Morrison H. Heckscher, longtime chair of the American Wing, called “a perceived need to introduce recent immigrants to the nation’s past” all pushed the museum toward American interiors. At the opening of the American Wing in 1924, R.T.H. Halsey, a stockbroker who became a trustee, then chairman of the Committee on American Decorative Arts, said, “The tremendous changes in the character of our nation and the influx of foreign ideas utterly at variance with those held by the men who gave us the Republic threaten, and unless checked may shake, the foundations of our Republic.” The American Wing, he argued, offered “a setting for the traditions so dear to us and invaluable in the Americanization of many of our people to whom much of our history has been hidden in a fog of unenlightenment.”
In a handbook for the wing written in 1924, Halsey, who remained chair until his death in 1942, and assistant curator Charles O. Cornelius laid out its intended narrative. The story began, somewhat unexpectedly, on the third floor with 17th-century interiors in the late Gothic tradition. These rooms, they explained, showed “the survival in provincial communities of the earlier traditions well into a time when they have been superseded in the more sophisticated settlements.” The second floor traced the growing influence of the Renaissance and the rococo between 1725 and 1790 — “a much greater sophistication of taste and a more finished craftsmanship,” with a new emphasis on luxury that reshaped “the physical surroundings of everyday life.” The first floor carried the story forward to the classical revival between 1790 and 1825. Taken together, the 15 rooms, according to Halsey, revealed a contrast: architecture evolved at a gradual pace, but the decorative arts — metalwork, textiles, pottery, glass — advanced much more rapidly. In his interpretation, American domesticity was a steady progression, moving from the stark, survival-driven homes of the 17th century to the polished interiors of the 19th — a sequence mirroring the nation’s growth.
Principal bedroom from the Sagredo Palace, Venice, ca. 1720; re-installed at Gallery 507 with period brocatelle wall coverings, which are not the originals. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Swiss Room, with its carved and inlaid paneling from a 17th-century Alpine house in Flims, reflects The Met’s early approach to European period rooms: importing richly decorated interiors that merge local traditions with Renaissance motifs to convey both regional identity and continental influence. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the decades following Halsey’s tenure, critics began questioning the project’s foundational logic. In the 1960s, a growing activist historic-preservation movement made people aware that it was preferable to keep entire buildings intact rather than extract elements of them, and as a result, period rooms were sidelined in curatorial practice for decades. Scholars and critics began to interrogate the constructed nature of the rooms, with their varying levels of authenticity and interpretation, and a wave of sociohistorical critique began reshaping the contours of the entire pursuit. By the 1980s, “the darlings of early 20th-century American art museums [had] become their hated stepchildren,” as historian Ivan Gaskell wrote in 2004. It was in this climate that Amelia Peck, longtime curator of the American Wing, arrived at the Met in 1980. Her first role was assisting the installation of the Frank Lloyd Wright room. True to form, the Met was slower than some other institutions to register the shifting currents in historic preservation and museum interpretation. There was, in fact, very little context publicly available at all. Labels consisted of little more than the house name, date, and donor. There was no explanation of why the rooms looked the way they did, who lived in them, or how the Met had acquired them.
Even though the rooms are arranged chronologically, Peck emphasizes that they don’t offer a full survey of American interiors. Instead, the rooms from the original 1924 American Wing reveal the lives of the elite, the founders’ xenophobia, and the era’s anxieties about communism and anarchism. Over the past four decades, Peck and her team have pushed back against Halsey’s original narrative, working to expand the stories these rooms tell. As part of the wing’s 2011 renovation, Peck removed some of the rooms that were incomplete or inauthentic, like one from New Hampshire that “had always been very puzzling” because it had no fireplace, which would have been essential in an 18th-century New England home. Others were architectural composites originally installed in the 20s, mishmashes of woodwork and fireplace walls from different centuries. Some of the rooms, like the Marmion and Verplanck Rooms, were moved so visitors could walk through them more easily. “With both of those rooms, you could only walk in one or two people’s depth through this little cage at the doorway. As a preservationist and architectural historian, I felt that experiencing the space was hugely important, not just looking at it.” In addition to opening up many of the rooms architecturally, Peck and her team have brought to light the workers, women, and enslaved people who maintained them. Some of the later rooms, like the McKim, Mead and White Stair Hall, highlight women patrons, while the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room — the latest to be added to the collection — is “very much a woman’s room,” Peck says. “I can’t imagine anyone but Mrs. Worsham asking for jewelry to be inlaid in her paneling.”
The Shaker Retiring Room, from the North Family Dwelling at Mount Lebanon, New York, entered The Met’s collection in 1972. Its built-in cupboards, pegboards, stained woodwork, and simple furniture reflect the sect’s spiritual discipline. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Wentworth Room, built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1695–1700; installed in the Met’s American Wing in 1937, alongside imported and American-made furniture in the William and Mary style. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 2009, touch screens were installed to address the broader circumstances of the rooms and their stories. These devices offer opportunities to unpack the histories of the people involved, the architecture, the objects, and how these rooms got to the museum in the first place. One of the best examples of this interpretative transformation is the Richmond Room. The 1810 parlor from lawyer Clayton Williams’s townhouse in Richmond, Virginia, features wallpaper depicting an idyllic view of Paris, stately Duncan Phyfe furniture, and rich mahogany woodwork. At first glance, it’s a fashionable, French-style interior. But how did an early 19th-century lawyer afford such a grand parlor? And where did the mahogany come from? “Richmond was one of the major depots of the slave trade, and Williams had a plantation outside of town with 40 enslaved people, which is likely how he made most of his money,” Peck says. And mahogany, the most expensive wood available at the turn of the 19th century, was harvested primarily using the forced labor of enslaved Africans. “As you begin to peel back these layers, it reveals a hugely interesting and different story from what the room first appears to be,” explains Peck.
The Met’s American Wing marked its centennial in 2024, with period rooms standing at a crossroads. Some institutions, like the Brooklyn Museum, are dismantling theirs, while elsewhere in the Met, attempts are being made to challenge the foundational logic of the genre. Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, installed in 2021, is a freestanding structure next to one of the museum’s oldest period rooms (a 15th-century Venetian bedchamber). Real and imagined artifacts from Seneca Village are shown alongside 19th-century ceramics, Bamileke beadwork, and works by contemporary artists including Tourmaline and Ini Archibong. According to the museum’s description it “rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected.” As for the period rooms in the American Wing, Peck, who is approaching 70, says it’s up to the next curator to decide which rooms to take out, which to add, and what new stories to tell. “What I’ve always said from the time I started here was that the interpretation of every room is completely due to the curator working on it. There are certain basics — hopefully you put in the architecture the way it was — but the rest of the decisions you make are very subjective,” she says. “There’s no one truth to installing a room.”
The Hart Room, from a first-generation New Englander’s home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1680, is the earliest period room in the American Wing. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The American Wing culminates with Frank Lloyd Wright’s living room for Frances W. Little, designed between 1912 and 1914. Peck considers it the wing’s best room, architecturally complete with all original furniture. With a background in theater — she once planned to be a stage designer and worked in costume design for a few years — Peck landed at the Met as a summer intern after earning a degree in historic preservation. “Working on that room was like making a stage set, in a way, but at the same time, being able to tell this incredible story about America’s greatest architect and the family who built this incredibly modern house for the time,” Peck says. The story of American interiors doesn’t end in 1914, but it’s hard for the museum to find the space for new rooms. And though she pushes back against Halsey’s chronological march of interiors, it would be jarring to drop a Modernist among the Federalists. Strangely enough, one of the only hard-and-fast domestic lessons that Peck has learned from her 40 plus years at the Met comes from the amount of physical labor and care that it takes to maintain these rooms. There have been a few moth infestations, and keeping the embroidered curtains and gilt picture frames dust-free is as much a part of their preservation as warding off visitors who try to step inside for a selfie. “There’s a certain amount of basic housekeeping that is part of my day-to-day job, making sure these fragile objects and wool carpets are intact,” she says. “That actually is one of the stories of American domesticity: it takes a lot of work to keep up the appearance.”