Real Rooms: Creating, Recreating and Visiting Home by Sonia Solicari, Curator and Museum Director

We hope you can join us on Monday 7 December for the launch, at Dora House, of Real Rooms: Creating, Recreating and Visiting Home by Sonia Solicari, curator and museum director.

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How do we make sense of the domestic in an ever-changing world? From the perspective of both museum visitors and curators, the book explores how we create and recreate home – past, present and future.

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This event will include a short presentation from Sonia and an opportunity to purchase the book (or have your copy signed if you already own it).

Warming refreshments will be provided.

Book by Monday 9 November and benefit from the 2 for 1 ticket offer!

About the author Sonia Solicari:

Sonia Solicari is a curator, writer, and museum leader driving cultural transformation. Since 2017, she has served as Director of Museum of the Home, London, heading a landmark redevelopment that doubled public space, launching new galleries and expanding bold, issues-led public programmes.

Previously, Sonia was Head of Guildhall Art Gallery and London’s Roman Amphitheatre, and Curator at the V&A. She sits on the National Museum Directors’ Council, serves on the Museums Association’s Ethics Committee, and is Chair of Stanley Arts and a Trustee of Bethlem Gallery.

About Real Rooms: Creating, Recreating and Visiting Home

Publication Date: 13th November 2026

Illustrating a fascinating range of curated interiors in museum and cultural settings, this is a unique sourcebook on storytelling and domestic space

There are many opportunities for tourists and cultural explorers to encounter homes that are open to the public. This book questions why we are so fascinated with these real and imagined spaces of domesticity and what it means to recreate home as a museum experience. It examines what desires are met when we walk through the door of a house museum or stumble across a room set in a gallery environment and reveals how these experiences tap into feelings of nostalgia, aspiration, inspiration, curiosity and empathy.

The case studies featured in Real Rooms range from famous examples such as the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Beatles’ Childhood Homes in Liverpool to the less widely known, but hugely compelling House of Annetta Museum in London and the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, New York. All of them seek to preserve, recreate and reimagine lived experience for a visiting audience and communicate a message about the meaning of home. A central chapter of the book, on Museum of the Home’s seven ‘Real Rooms’, sets out the history of the Museum and the ideas behind the rooms and includes an extended interview with the curatorial team.

Presenting the perspective of both visitors and curators, the book explores how we package and consume home and make sense of the domestic in an ever-changing world. Illustrated by moving, insightful stories, the book highlights issues of migration, imagination and fantasy, feminism, class, ethnicity, community and time – past, present and future.