5 Art Collections Housed in Homes

Private homes turned into art museums reflect a wealthy individual collector's personal taste, arranged (often permanently, by bequest) in the actual rooms they lived in, rather than sorted into the galleries of a purpose-built museum.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston — Gardner built a Venetian-style palazzo around a glass-roofed courtyard and filled it with Titians, Rembrandts, and Sargents. Her will requires everything to stay exactly where she placed it; when thieves stole 13 works in 1990, the museum left the empty frames hanging as placeholders. The infamous heist remains the largest unsolved art theft in history.

The Frick Collection, New York — industrialist Henry Clay Frick's Fifth Avenue mansion, still hung with Vermeers, Holbeins, and Rembrandts amid the original wood paneling and garden court, giving the sense of visiting a very rich friend rather than an institution. The Frick Collection completed a massive $220 million, multi-year renovation, officially reopening its doors to the public in 2025.

Sir John Soane's Museum, London — the architect crammed his own townhouse with antiquities, paintings (including Hogarth's A Rake's Progress), and architectural fragments using mirrors and skylights to create labyrinthine, layered rooms. It's less a collection displayed in a house than a house designed to be a collection.

Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris — a Belle Époque mansion built to display Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart's Italian Renaissance and French 18th-century collection.

Wallace Collection, London — the Hertford-Wallace family's townhouse, rich in French furniture, arms and armor, and Old Masters.