Welcome to the House Museum. Have You Seen Our New Bathroom?

Built in 1938, Walter Gropius’s three-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot residence in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has a box-like silhouette, a flat roof, and a stoic unornamented facade. It is one of the finest examples of Bauhaus functionalism adapted to regional conditions. Gropius, believing in the promise of industry to aid in affordability, ordered many of the structural elements and interior fixtures and finishes from catalogs rather than custom designing them. Importantly, he conceived of the house as a living system that would stand in harmony with its surroundings. Of the careful site planning, Ise Gropius, the architect’s wife, once said that "every evening we would wander to watch the sunset from our new property and we would plot which way the windows would have to face to take the best advantage of the light and view." The result is a place that exemplifies the conceptual unity that is at the heart of Bauhaus ideology.

Today, 3,500 people a year visit the site to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of Gropius’s experiment in modern living. But when they arrive, they are not greeted by the holistic vision he created. The house is interrupted by a seven-foot-tall, bright blue plastic port-a-potty standing next to the visitors center. "It’s one of the first things you see," says Vin Cipolla, the president and CEO of Historic New England, the preservation group that manages the house. "And in one way, you could say, ‘Well, that’s very Bauhaus. It’s an efficient solution kind of off the shelf, let’s try it out.’ But it subtracts from the experience."

The port-a-potty dilemma represents a challenge many operators of house museums face today: How do you best accommodate the vast numbers of guests visiting what was originally intended to be private, domestic space? Increasingly over the past 20 years, the institutions operating these sites have been figuring out how to better balance public access and historic preservation, with many upgrading their visitors centers to attract new audiences and to tell fuller stories about the sites and the people who lived there.

Fortunately, the days are numbered for the offending portable restroom at the Gropius House: Last year, Historic New England announced an international competition for a new restroom for the site and has since commissioned the architectural designer and Smith professor Isabel Strauss to build her winning entry. She designed a monolithic, fieldstone structure about the same size and shape as the garage. It will be sited a few paces away from the visitors center, which is located inside what was originally the family’s two-car garage and has just enough space for an information booth and small shop. Strauss sought to create something "deferential yet monumental, and inexpensive to build," she told the Architect’s Newspaper. This perspective references Gropius’s approach yet expresses it in a way that doesn’t try to mimic the house. "We’re solving a need without in any way disturbing the historic importance of the site and the experience of visiting the place as it would have been intended by Gropius himself," Cipolla says.

The matter of historic integrity in house museums is constantly evolving. They’re not simply walls and furniture; they’re complex containers for lives lived. There are between 8,000 and 15,000 historic house museums across the United States, though relatively few have the pedigree of an internationally famous architect, like the Gropius House. When the first house museums debuted to the public in the late 19th century, history wasn’t considered; it was more about voyeurism and raising money to pay for maintenance and upkeep, notes Monica Nelson, the author of These Long Shadows, a forthcoming book about women’s house museums in the American South. The families or owners of these homes "were just opening them for the opulence and for people to come look at this bygone era of wealth," she says. "They weren’t really considering all the narratives that needed to be told." To wit, a portion of the slave quarters at Longwood, a mansion and plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, was converted into restrooms.

Engaging more critically with the past is part of the work to better position private spaces for public engagement. "It’s in the ethical framework of the [house museum’s] director and the board of directors to decide how they want to maintain the legacy," Nelson says. "Everything in history is twenty-pronged. Who are we answering to? Who’s paying for this? What story is this servicing?"

Kirsten Reoch, executive director at the Glass House, Philip Johnson’s home in New Canaan, Connecticut, is currently grappling with the tension between architectural preservation and public education. Because of zoning restrictions, the Glass House isn’t able to perform any commercial operations from its site, so it constructed a visitor’s center in downtown New Canaan, right across from the train station. (Johnson, who willed his property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, originally intended Da Monsta, an angular red structure he completed on the Glass House property in 1995, to serve as a welcome center for guests; it now has a restroom.) The visitors center features a gift shop, gallery wall with basic information on Johnson, and staff offices. Interpretation for visitors is the responsibility of tour guides; there are no plaques or wall labels across the property. "Right now our site is very literally the way that Johnson left it to us," says Reoch, whose priority is preserving the purity of Johnson’s architectural vision. (As for the architect’s controversial reputation, there isn’t much mention.) But for the Glass House to grow and become more culturally responsive, and to better contextualize it and New Canaan’s important role in the history of modernism, Reoch says they need to expand the visitors center, namely with more exhibition space.

Since people often come to see a time capsule, visitors centers often operate like a second museum. In 2023, a new interpretive center for Andalusia, the Georgia farm where the novelist Flannery O’Connor resided, which is featured in Nelson’s book, opened. It provided space to exhibit recently found oil paintings by the writer. At Olana, the Hudson Valley estate of the painter Frederic Church, a new visitors center by the architecture firm ARO helps engage guests with the greater significance of the cultural landscape as a whole, which recently underwent an $18 million restoration by the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz. Before, visitors drove up a long winding road to the house without any orientation about how the approach to the 19th-century mansion—specifically how it slowly reveals itself—is an essential part of Church’s artistic vision.

These new buildings can help visitors appreciate the old even more. When The Frick Collection, a museum that is housed in the former Gilded Age mansion of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, opened in the 1930s, the domestic spaces on the second floor were converted into offices out of necessity for administrative space. This is part of the reason why the institution spent $330 million to build a new addition onto the New York City manse (it includes educational space, special exhibition galleries, an auditorium, offices, and a gift shop) as well as restore the second floor, an undertaking spearheaded by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. Accessibility was another factor: There was no elevator to the second floor and people using wheelchairs could not enter the front door.

The second level is more modest and intimate than the first—and would only be accessed by Frick and his family—and is now open to the public for the first time. Seeing Frick’s favorite painting, a portrait of Lady Hamilton by George Romney, just as it hung in his bedroom, on an ornately carved wall, is a profoundly intimate experience. Similarly, seeing the paintings French artist Francis Boucher made for Lady Frick’s boudoir, which were relocated to what was once a butler’s pantry on the ground floor, in their original location shifts the understanding of the artwork in relation to the architecture. "You just get a different sense of the human experience of what it must have been like to live with these works of art, collect them, and be their kind of living custodians at that time," says Aimee Ng, the museum’s chief curator.

A good visitors center can also help attract more attention to a house museum, which is important for the financial health of the institution. In Mexico City, César Cervantes, the founder of a popular taco chain and an art collector, understood this calculus when opening Tetetlán, a restaurant, gallery, shop, and cultural center adjacent to Casa Pedregal, a house Luis Barragán completed in Mexico City 1950. It is immensely popular, and draws more visitors than the house itself. According to Alejandro Alvarado, who directs visitor experience at Casa Pedregal, Tetetlán hosts 175,000 people annually compared to 20,000 who tour the residence. (Tickets are limited since Cervantes resides in the house.) All tours convene at Tetetlán, which is built in what were originally horse stables for Casa Pedregal but had been renovated into commercial spaces through the years.

Cervantes and the architect Jorge Covarrubias conceived of their renovation as an adaptive reuse. They stripped the architecture back as much as they could and installed a glass floor that enables visitors to see the lava rock that defines the topography of the Pedregal neighborhood, which Barragán developed. And modern interventions can be easily removed. "The restoration of Tetetlán was conceived as a way to protect, buffer, and complement Casa Pedregal," Alvarado says. "Rather than approaching the house as an isolated architectural masterpiece, visitors are introduced to a living environment that reflects many of the values, traditions, and creative expressions that helped shape both modern Mexico and Luis Barragán’s vision."

Reservations book up for its restaurant, which prepares meals with organic and sustainable agriculture, and there’s a constant stream of people coming in for coffee and yoga classes. Plus, it’s financially lucrative and helps fund restoration work. "In this sense, Tetetlán serves not only as a preservation strategy for Casa Pedregal, but also as a living platform that fosters community engagement, cultural exchange, and creative exploration while keeping the spirit of Pedregal alive and relevant for contemporary audiences," Alvarado adds. Cervantes is repeating the formula at Casa Covarrubias, the home of artists Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias, which will open as a cultural center later this year.

Back in the U.S., Vin Cipolla says that in addition to the planned Gropius House project, Historic New England has constructed public restrooms in barns, tool sheds, and gatehouses for the sites it manages. The Gropius House bathroom is only the second one that it has constructed from the ground up. "What’s paramount for us as a historic preservation and public history organization is to honor the history, honor the important structures that are there, and create minimal interventions," he says. "Historic integrity is what you’re leading with while accommodating necessary, accessible, and modern uses."

The new bathroom is now awaiting funding before a construction timeline can be set. "I’m confident that we'll be able to generate the resources to get this done," Cipolla says. He believes the new facilities will become a draw, engage more conversation among the architecture community, and perhaps entice new visitors as well. "People are going to want to see this."

Top photo image and design by Isabel Strauss, courtesy Historic New England

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