Skip to Content

rugs

Challenges for conserving the collection today


Sebastiano Barassi

Transcript
It is difficult to retain that sense of this being a house, especially as time goes by. It's quite complicated to make it look as if it's a lived-in space because it's looking older and older, it's not just because the furnishings aging but it's in general the taste that's looking old. It's more and more like a bit of a time capsule in a sense. Things like the rugs and the actual building, the floors and walls and, you know, wear and tear in general, wherever visitors get and that's where we have a problem, and the artwork of course. One of the main problems is the fact that Jim put a lot of importance on the presence of daylight and how it interacts with things in the house and that obviously means that we have to allow a lot more sunlight into the house than it would be normally acceptable in a museum environment. It can be controlled and the damage minimised but it's still not ideal so that is really one of the big conservation challenges.