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confidence to go the whole way, and they also helped us to think about our new mission to reveal and rethink ideas on the home. Tis inspired the graphic identity – the designers played with shadow and light and that informed the final look and feel of the new brand. Tey developed a colour palette quite early on, inspired by colours they saw on our site – red from the brick, green from the gardens and blue from the sky. Te red was turbo-charged into coral and became one of the core colours in our new identity – we want something that stands out in its right and doesn’t clash with what’s there. dn&co worked with Colophon Foundry on the bespoke font.
What qualities do you look for when commissioning designers and architects? We want to work with people who share our values and are as keen as we are to create a
new type of museum. We also look for people who are happy to challenge and push us as clients. We definitely had that with dn&co as we were initially quite timid with the brief.
What were the main challenges of the architectural part of the project? Working with our 18th century buildings was always both a really exciting opportunity and the biggest challenge. Because we weren’t dealing with white cube spaces, we had to be flexible and agile in our curatorial responses because we never knew what the quirkiness of the building would throw at us.
Te brief started with the problems we had with visitor flow, which was linear and led to bottlenecks. We were unable to accommodate buggies and wheelchairs and visitors had little choice over their route. We also had problems with the storage of our collections which were housed in the damp, cramped almshouses basement and was too small for the curators to stand up in – that was a really urgent problem that had to be solved. So we needed more space, but we also needed to make sure we preserved our 18th century building for the next 300 years.
Wright & Wright’s solution was to create a more functional basement level in the almshouses to accommodate exhibition space for the new Home Galleries, and to reinstate the first floor to incorporate a study area. Te practice also created a new entrance and two new garden buildings, and relocated the café into an adjacent former pub.
What were your priorities for the Home Galleries and how have you worked with ZMMA to achieve your vision for these new exhibitions?
Our priorities were to show a more diverse view of home. We also needed to take a more thematic approach, which combined the contemporary and the historic, in contrast to the chronological Rooms Trough Time displays. We want the galleries to speak to people very personally and encourage them to think about what is the same, and what is different, to their version of home. We wanted to embrace the domestic scale of the new exhibition space but also give the different, bijou sections their own identities by introducing very vibrant hues. We encourage visitors to spend time in there and have a very intimate experience with the exhibits. ZMMA really embraced working in such a challenging setting. Te brief was to work with our Documenting Homes collection, and ZMMA incorporated photos from that propped up on boxes and shelves within the gallery spaces.
Above and left The new entrance, which incorporates the museum's signature coral colour; the basement level accommodates exhibition space for the Home Galleries
Right The museum's new reception area
Has the completed redevelopment project exceeded your expectations? What do you feel works particularly well?
One thing I think really works well is being able to move around the whole site so easily. I also love the amount of natural light that now comes into the building and the new connections between inside and out. We
Now that the Museum has relaunched, do you have any more design ventures in the pipeline?
We might take a few months to have a breather after the redevelopment and reopening. Ten the big next project will be tackling the Rooms Trough Time. Tese were last redone in the 1990s and they need a fundamental rethink. We know that visitors want to go into them more – but how do we make them more interactive while safeguarding the historical material? We also need to look at whose story is being told in the rooms. I think the Museum of the Home is well placed to be leading the conversation about the recreation of domestic experiences. Tere’s a lot of thinking to do, and then the fundraising.
We might also look at whether the staff offices in the north and south wings of the almshouses are in the right place, or whether these should instead become public space. – Sonia Solicari has been director of the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum of the Home) since 2017. Te London museum recently reopened after a £18.1m expansion and refurbishment by Wright & Wright Architects, featured in FX 321
turned some windows into doors, and had some brilliant light engineering done to work out when we can open up the blinds without damaging the exhibits. Visitors get a real sense of where they are in the museum and there are framed little vignettes of the gardens through the windows, which become part of the display.
What have you enjoyed most, and least, about being a design client for the redevelopment process?
I love all the creative conversations – getting all the plans out and really going into the detail. But undertaking a construction project under Covid was extremely challenging. All those messy site conversations had to be done online, and the task of coordinating all the sub-contractors was trickier. But we did still manage to continue the construction during lockdown.
FAR LEFT: EM FITZGERALD
LEFT AND RIGHT: HUFTON+CROW
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