The world’s best house museums

More from this Series

• House museums #57: Pearl S Buck

  The author’s best-selling works were a bridge between the US and China, where she grew up, at a time of ignorance and prejudice

  
• House museums #56: the Museum of Innocence

  The house in Istanbul is a companion piece to Orhan Pamuk’s bestselling novel of the same name about a doomed love affair

  
• House museums #55: the Eames House

  The home of the polymathic designer couple Charles and Ray Eames evinces their mid-century modern ideals 

  
• House museums #54: sculptor Chaim Gross

  His Greenwich Village apartment was a haven for this talented yet little-known artist displaced from his European home

  
• House museums #53: James Joyce’s Martello tower

  The Irish author lived in the defensive fort only a short time — but it would be pivotal in the writing of ‘Ulysses’

  
• House museums #52: Casa Vicens, by Antoni Gaudí

  The Barcelona home is considered to be the architect’s first masterpiece

  
• House museums #51: Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio

  This formative building in the career of the US architect was the first over which he had complete artistic control

  
• House museums #50: Oscar Wilde

  The young author experienced both heartbreak and scandal in this gracious Dublin home

  
• House museums #49: Monticello

  Curators at Thomas Jefferson’s palatial home in Virginia try to balance the US founding father’s lofty ideals with his involvement in slavery

  
• House museums #48: Lamb House

  The Georgian house in Rye, East Sussex, was Henry James’s home for several years and where he wrote some of his best-known works

  
• House museums #47: Schindler House

  The LA house of Viennese architect Rudolf Schindler is a European intellectual’s take on bohemian California life

  
• House museums #46: Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily

  The owner of this sumptuous residence with the finest in situ mosaics in the Roman world remains a mystery

  
• House museums #45: Brontë Parsonage

  The West Yorkshire home of the Brontë sisters is a place of pilgrimage for their ever-devoted readership

  
• House museums #44: Paul Cézanne

  The painter’s house and studio near Aix-en-Provence, where he created some late masterpieces, was his last workspace

  
• House museums #43: Tenement Museum

  The museum honours the waves of immigrants who came to New York in search of a better life

  
• House museums #42: Museo Fortuny

  Mariano Fortuny began creating his flowing gowns and sumptuous textiles in the Venetian palazzo he restored

  
• House museums #41: Howard Carter

  The Egyptian home of the man who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 has recently been restored

  
• House museums #40: Kettle’s Yard

  The Cambridge home of Jim and Helen Ede was a radical statement about living alongside beauty

  
• House museums #39: Ernő Goldfinger’s 2 Willow Road

  The architect ruffled feathers in Hampstead with his Modernist terrace — and inspired the name of a James Bond villain

  
• House museums #38: Musée de la Vie romantique

  This Paris villa was the home of painter Ary Scheffer, whose salons were frequented by Romantic figures such as Delacroix, Chopin and George Sand

  
• House museums #37: Farleys House, home of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller

  A sleepy East Sussex village was the unlikely nucleus of British Surrealism

  
• House museums #36: Alice Austen

  The museum devoted to this Victorian woman photographer is a site of pilgrimage for the LGBTQ+ community

  
• House museums #35: Eltham Palace

  The Courtaulds’ opulent London home melded Art Deco, the medieval and some distinctive pets

  
• House museums #34: Le Corbusier’s apartment-studio

  A home should be ‘a machine for living in’, said the architect, as his Paris flat exemplifies

  
• House museums #33: Oswaldo Guayasamín

  The posthumously completed Quito home of the Ecuadorean artist blends Baroque, European and indigenous imagery

  
• House museums #32: Jane Austen

  A simple table and chair hold pride of place in the Hampshire home that celebrates the life of the English novelist

  
• House museums #31: Victor Hugo

  The writer decorated his Guernsey home himself and made many of its objects while in exile there

  
• House museums #30: Musée Gustave Moreau

  ‘The chimerical, almost delirious quality of his hyper-detailed treatment of mythical and biblical subjects chimed with public taste in the second half of the 19th century’

  
• House museums #29: Sigmund Freud

  The centrepiece of the room, and arguably of the whole museum, is the couch where patients were treated with the psychoanalyst’s ‘talking cure’

  
• House museums #28: Casa Luis Barragán

  The pared-down, sensual home of the revered Mexican architect graces a working-class neighbourhood in Mexico City

  
• House museums #27: La Maison Jean Cocteau, Milly-la-Forêt

  The artist, writer and film-maker bought the theatrical home with the proceeds of his seminal work ‘La Belle et la Bête’

  
• House museums #26: Down House, Home of Charles Darwin

  The naturalist’s ‘very ugly’ south London abode offers an insight into his genial family life and continuing experiments

  
• House museums #25: Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat

  The three-storey concrete and glass box built into a hillside overlooking the centre of Brno remains a touchstone of Modernism

  
• House museums #24: Fumio Asakura Museum of Sculpture

  The Japanese artist’s home and studio is an oasis of calm among Tokyo’s bustling streets

  
• House museums #23: The Beatles’ Childhood Homes

  A tour takes fans through the formative Liverpool addresses of Fab Four founders John Lennon and Paul McCartney

  
• House museums #22: Château de Monte-Cristo

  This exuberant estate built by French novelist Alexandre Dumas stands restored as a monument to his legacy

  
• House museums #21: Handel Hendrix House

  Separated by more than two centuries, the musical neighbours in time both found their sojourns in Mayfair rewarding

  
• House museums #20: Stephen Wright’s House of Dreams

  This house in south London, a visual archive of the artist’s life, transports visitors from the quotidian to the truly exotic

  
• House museums #19: Georgia O’Keeffe

  The American artist’s New Mexico home is surrounded by the dramatic landscapes she painted

  
• House museums #18: Sir John Soane’s Museum

  A drawing office on the top floor of the architect’s theatrical home has opened to the public for the first time

  
• House museums #17: Dylan Thomas

  The Welsh poet lived in this ‘sea-shaken house on a breakneck of rocks’ during the last four years of his short life

  
• House museums #16: Louis Armstrong

  ‘The house of the jazz musician is, in many ways, profoundly unassuming: low ceilings, creaky floors, wall-to-wall carpeting. In other ways, it is absolutely bonkers’

  
• House museums #15: Edvard Grieg

  The villa near Bergen brims with intriguing details of the life of the Norwegian composer, including how he dealt with stage fright

  
• House museums #14: architect Lina Bo Bardi

  The glass house she built seems to dissolve into the Brazilian rainforest and to embody her escape from war-torn Italy

  
• House museums #13: Elvis Presley’s Graceland

  The Memphis mansion gives a glimpse of who the ‘king of rock and roll’ was away from the spotlight

  
• House museums # 12: architect Victor Horta

  Horta’s Brussels home and atelier is the embodiment of flamboyant Art Nouveau design

  
• House museums #11: Arthur Rimbaud

  A museum devoted to this pioneer of modern poetry is the greatest cultural asset of a small town in northern France

  
• House museums #10: Andrew Carnegie

  The industrialist’s Scottish birthplace charts his extraordinary rise from bobbin boy to the world’s richest man

  
• House museums #9: Little Holland House

  How Frank Dickinson brought to life his youthful vision of an ideal home in the Arts and Crafts style — on a tiny budget

  
• House museums #8: Ossip Zadkine

  The Paris home of the sculptor is a place of concentrated creativity, calm and luminosity

  
• House museums #7: Picasso’s Birthplace Museum, Málaga, Spain

  This year is the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death — a fitting time to visit the place of his birth

  
• House museums #6: Donald Judd’s loft, 101 Spring Street, New York

  The artist used his home as a test-bed for concretising the intimate relationship between art and architecture, sculpture and space

  
• House museums #5: Elizabeth Gaskell’s House

  The former Manchester residence of the Victorian novelist and social reformer strives to offer hands-on history

  
• House museums #4: Edward Linley Sambourne’s house

  The London town house where the noted Punch cartoonist lived is a ‘time-warp of late Victoriana’

  
• House museums #3: Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 78 Derngate

  This eye-catching Northampton house was the Scottish architect’s final major commission

  
• House museums #2: Musée Édith Piaf, Paris

  Two small rooms are crammed with artefacts from the life of one of France’s greatest popular singers

  
• Gainsborough museum: from ‘just’ a house to a cultural institution

  In the first in a series on house museums, Edwin Heathcote visits the new iteration of the home of one of England’s most popular painters