Having spent the morning in a lovely Arts and Crafts home, in which most of the furnishings match the style, I got to thinking (again) about one of the oddities of this place. There is a strong sense of continuity on one hand: that of ownership, so the house has a closely linked textual and visual history and context. On the other hand, the house is a evolved structure. It was not built of a piece: there are four distinct expansions and modifications, none of which completely erase the previous layer. The one possible exception is that the exterior, true Queen Anne Victorian facade was removed and replaced with an early Shingle style, but the interior Queen Anne style is still findable. The furnishings are equally layered. They all belong to the same family, but the range spans almost two centuries, multiple styles and at least three very different regions. The house is not in the style of x, nor furnished in the style of x.
This may be part of why the immediate reaction of the visitor is that it has a museum-like quality. Museum furniture collections tend to show a wide range of style, taste and time period. They are not of a piece in the way that historic houses tend to be.
This gives a wider opportunity to tell a multitude of diverse stories. Each piece of furniture is a hook to a person or a place in a different time period. It does mean that telling a single story is harder, unless that story’s line is dominanted by change over time.
Acair Fearann 
and since it is all one family, one also has the sense of being able “see” time pass — it isn’t a snapshot. That is something which would be almost impossible to create from scratch — even in a museum, never mind in a house (Mark Twain’s comes to mind!) which has been restored.
I think that is one of the values of place. In general the cheap but good pieces aren’t represented in a museum or recreated house. The curators want the best of the best or worst of the worst, not a representative sample, which can include the best (of course) but also includes the equivalent of the Wal-Mart special. One might consider that the highly selective vision of the past common in the theory of many museum exhbits (people either lived in appalling slums or the most elegant conditions possible) probably warps the fundamental idea that the people in the past were…just like us.
I’m not sure it counts as a “first” impression, but, as an adult it has been a lasting one: taking all the furniture into consideration, this body has found essentially no really comfortable chairs in the whole lot! My name must be Goldilocks. (Grins) I did, as a teenager, make a comfortable reading nest with large soft pillows on the old couch in the library. Couch now gone? Pillows???
The house certainly isn’t a “set piece” (thank goodness; those are totally non-functional). Not a museum, either; it certainly has been “dealt with” by various generations from their various perspectives, but in no way “curated”. also, I’d say, a good thing.
I have heard the comment that it somewhat resembles a high-quality antique shop. . . of no particular period.
But for those of us who live or have lived there it is comfortable (mentally, seating aside) and familiar, which is probably what is most important.
It is funny, I actually tend to find many of the chairs fairly comfortable (as much as I find anything comfortable, the floor is my style)! The couch actually migrated to Happy Thought, I think we all liked the comfort…it was just so large and less than good looking. Perhaps redoing the cushions on the window bench in something a bit more forgiving might be in order, that has the bonus of the radiator underneath.
Curation is perhaps as potentially hazardous as being ‘dealt with’. Museum curators always have agendas, sometimes stridently over-the-top, I encountered the latter in a head curator of an unspecified national museum a little while ago, quite appalling. Benign neglect has its points when it comes to understanding a place.
No, not that couch. An earlier one, with no back nor arms, and not brown. Totally disreputable even then. It was under the window to the left of the door to the porch. More like a day bed, actually. And the pillows were quite soft and malleable, hence leading to nest-making. Unfortunately (from my point of view) the call: “Betsy, time to come set the table!” could penetrate even into that nest.