Collecting Contemporary Home Life

With a renewed interest in evocative ensembles on the one hand, and a museological focus on contemporaneity on the other, it is remarkable that debates on collecting contemporary home life have overlooked the concept of a modern period room. Outside the museum context, however, furniture stores, construction firms and estate agents try to tempt potential buyers using modern period-room-like displays. This book examines three such commercial cases: IKEA’s room settings, BAM’s Homestudios and the funda House. Aiming to develop a viable strategy for how cultural-history museums collect contemporary home life, Mayke Groffen analyses these cases from a museum curator’s perspective and explores what insights can be gained from them.