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Basically medieval in character, the woodwork in the Samuel Hart house from Ipswich, Massachusetts, carries on construction traditions that were familiar to the English colonists. The massive oak timbers of the post-and-beam framing are largely exposed and stand out against white plaster walls and ceiling. The casement windows (reproductions) are small with diamond-shaped leaded panes. The room was long thought to have come from the house of Thomas Hart, who died in 1674. Through dendrochronology—a scientific method of dating and analyzing growth rings in trees—the house was determined to have been built some twenty years later by his son, Samuel. The furnishings in the room—known in the period as a "hall"—are based on those found in Samuel Hart's probate inventory, and show the multiple uses—including cooking, dining, and sleeping—of a downstairs living space.

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The Wentworth house was the once grand Portsmouth home of John Wentworth (1671–1730) and Sarah Hunking Wentworth (1673–1741). John Wentworth was a merchant and sea captain who served as lieutenant governor of New Hampshire from 1717 to 1730. The grand second-story space most likely functioned as the best chamber in the house, used for both sleeping and informal entertaining. At approximately 29 feet long by 18 feet wide, it is one of the largest domestic interiors that survives from the early colonial period. Finely carved wooden wall panels, crisp quarter-round chamfering of two summer beams, and the beautiful bolection molding around the fireplace are among the outstanding features. The William and Mary–style furniture in the room was highly fashionable at the time the house was built.

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The Museum's New York Dutch Room comes from an eighteenth-century house built by Daniel Peter Winne (1720–1800) on the famed Van Rensselaer Manor (present-day Bethlehem, outside of Albany). The style is characteristic of the earliest Dutch settlements in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Albany region, in particular, which continued to be favored until the mid-eighteenth century. The timbers used to build the house were felled in 1750. Although a thousand or more wood-framed houses may have been built in the distinctive Dutch style, only about a dozen examples still survive. Before the Museum acquired the house, its original structure had been obscured by additions; the historic nature of the building's core was not discovered until shortly before it was to be removed from the site by the owner.

As was typical for Dutch domestic architecture of the time, the Winne house was a one-and-a-half-story wood-frame structure. Its main room, located on the first floor, featured a large jamb-less fireplace lined with blue-and-white Delft tiles. Massive 23-foot-wide post-and-beam assemblies known as anchor bents with curved bracing at the corners, typical of seventeenth-century Low Country European house design, supported the floor above. The native yellow pine beams and braces and the upstairs floorboards that formed the ceiling of the room were planed and scraped smooth and never painted. To this day, the exposed wood retains its original patina from 250 years of exposure to light, air, and smoke from fires on the open hearth. The beams, fragments of the original blue-and-white Delft and red earthen hearth tiles, and even the original floorboards from the house have been reassembled at the Museum.

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The Hewlett Room reflects the influence of eighteenth-century English building and architectural manuals, which contained classical designs adapted from Italian Renaissance sources. The intense blue of the woodwork and the orange red inside the shell cupboard were both popular color choices at the time, and—after microscopic analysis of color chip samples—the Museum has replicated the exact hues of the original paint. The paints were specially made for the room, with natural pigments suspended in linseed oil. The Dutch tiles around the fireplace opening, which depict biblical scenes, are not original to this room, but rather representative of tiles that were imported in the mid-eighteenth century.

The room also includes examples of early eighteenth-century decoration on painted furniture, quillwork, needlework, and ceramics. At the time the Hewlett Room was built, painters were being influenced by materials and decorative techniques from the Far East and India as the result of trade routes that had newly opened in the previous century. Painters imitated lacquer ware with a method called "japanning," in which a dazzling array of animals, flowers, and Far Eastern figures and structures were depicted in gold leaf and paint on polished black backgrounds. They also painted furniture to simulate exotic wood, marble, tortoiseshell, or ivory. Naturalistic landscapes and courting couples similar to those found in contemporary needlework sometimes decorated this bright and fanciful furniture.

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Passed down through the family of the New York merchant Samuel Verplanck, the furnishings in this room are probably from the parlor of the house at 3 Wall Street that he acquired in 1763. (That house was eventually torn down to make room for the Branch Bank of the United States.) The card table and four matching chairs, as well as other Chippendale-style furniture in the room, are all part of a suite of furniture made in New York City for the Verplancks. Pieces from the family's service of Chinese export porcelain are on display in the built-in cupboard, located to the left of the fireplace that is flanked by a pair of export porcelain hearth jars. John Singleton Copley painted the portraits of Samuel Verplanck and his brother Gulian in 1771 during his only visit to New York.

The Museum acquired the room's paneled fireplace wall and other architectural fittings—from the 1767 house of Cadwallader Colden Jr., near Newburgh, in Orange County, New York—to provide an appropriate setting for the Verplanck family possessions.

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Originally the second-story assembly room in John Gadsby's City Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia—a major coach stop on the principal north-south land route—this stately public chamber was the site of several important historical events. In 1798, George Washington celebrated his final birth night ball in the room and, in 1824 and 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette was entertained here during his triumphal American visit. The musicians' gallery—a small balcony along the room's south wall—suggests the room's original function.

Although this room was built in 1793, its woodwork design is copied from an English architectural manual first published much earlier. Three portraits of George Washington are displayed in the room, including a large, formal example by Gilbert Stuart. The room is furnished with highlights of the Museum's exceptional collection of Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture. The woodwork has been repainted to match its color in the mid-eighteenth century, using natural pigments suspended in linseed oil.

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This fully paneled room, the most ambitious decoratively painted interior to survive from colonial America, was the principal parlor in Marmion, a plantation house in northern Virginia. Although the house dates from the mid-eighteenth century, most of the decorative painting was added about twenty-five years later. The room is unusual in that it incorporates the complete Ionic order—molded bases, fluted pilasters, carved capitals, and a full entablature—as proscribed by the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. In contrast to the perfectly proportioned architectural order painted in faux marble, the rest of the room is ornamented with paintings of a fantasy world of art and nature, loosely copied from European prints. To highlight the decorative program on the walls, the room is shown unfurnished.

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This Georgian-style room was originally part of a townhouse that now stands at 244 South Third Street in Philadelphia. Built in 1765–66 for a Scottish shipmaster and merchant named Charles Stedman (1713–1784), the house was sold to Samuel Powel on August 2, 1769. Powel hired the finest craftsmen in Philadelphia to embellish the rooms, which Stedman had decorated more simply. The carpenter-builder Robert Smith (ca. 1722–1777) improved on the paneling and woodwork throughout the room, most notably evidenced by the richly carved ornamentation on the fireplace mantel and over mantel.

During Powel's residence, the house was one of the social centers of Philadelphia, and indeed of all the colonies. Samuel Powel served in many public capacities, most notably as the last mayor of Philadelphia under British rule and the first after the Revolution. His house was frequently visited by luminaries, such as George Washington and John Adams, who called the house a "splendid seat."

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The Baltimore Dining Room is from a townhouse built between 1810–11 for a well-to-do merchant named Henry Craig. The house's simple exterior belied the elegance of the interior's finely proportioned rooms, which followed the Neoclassical style. Gracefully simple geometric forms, such as the repeating ovals in the mantel and wainscoting, are characteristic of the refinement of high-style Federal interiors.

Although the room originally functioned as a parlor, here it is installed as a dining room in order to showcase several fine pieces of contemporaneous furniture. The Baltimore-made dining table features legs beautifully inlaid with bellflowers in a carrot-shaped pendant. The porcelain on the dining room table is part of an extremely rare French service made for the American market. Several imported luxury items, such as an English chandelier with matching candelabra, are also on view.

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Rescued from a derelict house in Petersburg, Virginia, this room serves as a setting for furniture collected by Mrs. Harry Horton Benkard and given to the Museum after her death. The architectural trim of the room is enriched by stucco ornament in the form of delicate arabesques, foliage, and other motifs reminiscent of an Adam interior. The carved central panel of the marble mantel depicts the classical legend of Leda and the Swan.

The furniture provides a summary statement of American Neoclassical forms and ornament and it is a striking reminder of the private collector's role in appreciating and preserving American decorative arts. Works include a New York square-back sofa, a mahogany and satinwood secretary-bookcase from Baltimore, and a pair of Boston Sheraton-style card tables and a set of square-back mahogany chairs. A modern Brussels carpet copied from an unusual needlepoint example made in New York State in 1810 covers the floor.

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This lavish room was originally part of the 1810 home of William Clayton Williams (1768–1817), a Richmond lawyer. Williams was a member of a committee charged with furnishing Virginia's newly built governor's mansion in 1813, which suggests that he had a reputation as a man of good taste, as well as the knowledge of appropriate furnishings for the state's most prestigious dwelling.

The room is furnished with some of the most high-style Federal furniture in the American Wing's collection, including work of New York City cabinetmakers Duncan Phyfe (1768–1856) and Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819).

The scenic wallpaper "The Monuments of Paris" depicts the famous sites of Paris as if they stood together in a row along the banks of the Seine. Although we do not know if the original room was, in fact, papered, we do know that this 1814 pattern was offered for sale in Richmond during Williams's time. For the reinstallation of this room, a complete set was not available for purchase, so the Museum reproduced the pattern using existing wallpaper in a parlor in Effingham, New Hampshire, as the primary model. Although the original was printed with hand-cut wood blocks, the reproduction wallpaper is silk-screened; more than one thousand screens were used for the complete series.

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The Haverhill room comes from a house built around 1805 by the merchant James Duncan Jr. (1756–1822) and his wife Rebekah (1754–1838). Duncan's family ran a successful business that included shipping, distilleries, real estate, and a chain of stores along the Merrimack River from Massachusetts into New Hampshire.

Although originally created as a formal parlor, the room is shown here as a bedroom in order to display a remarkable bed of the same period. The bed's frame is attributed to the workshop of the great Boston cabinetmaker Thomas Seymour, the unusual gilded-and-painted cornices to frame maker John Doggett and decorative painter John Penniman. The beauty of the furniture is further enhanced by the delicate detailing in the room. The mantelpiece, with its elegant detached columns and urns, and the lacey molding that encircles the room typify the best of early Neoclassicism in America.

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After the American Revolution, many Americans left the more established Protestant churches for more recently formed religious groups. One of these was the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers because their worship services often culminated in a frenzied dance. Community members adhered to a rigid set of rules, known as the Millennial Rules, which regulated all aspects of their lives, including correct methods of spiritual worship, proper deportment between the sexes, and suitable furnishings for their rooms.

The Shaker Retiring Room is from the North Family Dwelling in New Lebanon, which dates to around 1830–40. The New Lebanon community, active from 1787 to 1947, was the central ministry of the sect. This room served as both a bedroom and, as proscribed by the Millennial Laws, a place to retire to "in silence, for the space of half an hour, and labor for a sense of the gospel, before attending meeting." The clean, white plaster walls, scrubbed pine floor, and simple stained woodwork aged to a warm ochre reveal three of the most typical characteristics of Shaker design: utility, simplicity, and beauty. As in many Shaker interiors, a pegboard runs around the room to hold various objects up from the floor for day-to-day storage and to facilitate cleaning. Much of the furniture in this room came to the Museum through the collection of Faith and Edward Deming Andrews, who in the 1930s began documenting the lives, beliefs, and crafts of the Shakers.

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Installed in 1983, the Robert and Gloria Manney Greek Revival parlor is a re-creation that suggests how the formal front parlor in a fashionable New York City townhouse of about 1835 might have looked. The room was designed to showcase a rare suite of furniture made by Duncan Phyfe for the New York lawyer Samuel A. Foote. Among the only period elements in the room are an Ionic columnar screen at the entrance and a black marble mantelpiece from Halstead, a Greek Revival house in Rye, New York. The rest of the room was either patterned after existing parlors or based on designs found in some of the most popular architectural books of the day.

The 1837 suite of furniture—couches, stools, benches, and side chairs—is an example of the late work of Phyfe and his workshop. It was made to furnish a town house at 678 Broadway, into which Samuel Foote moved his family in 1837. These pieces feature luxuriously curving forms that highlight the beauty of their gleaming mahogany surfaces, and a true quality of design.

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The florid architectural elements of the Museum's Rococo Revival parlor were once part of an Italianate villa in Astoria, Queens, that overlooked the East River. The villa was built around 1852 by the New York businessman Horace Whittemore. The entire parlor is decorated in what would have been called the "French taste," which was the accepted style for parlors during the mid-nineteenth century. Known today as "Rococo Revival," the style is characterized by graceful, curvaceous forms, cabriole legs, dramatically grained woods, and deep, naturalistic carving.

The room showcases a splendid rosewood parlor suite attributed to the New York City cabinetmaker John Henry Belter, the foremost practitioner of the style. The furniture is somewhat grander than what the Whittemore family would have owned. In fact, the Museum's suite is among the most ornate produced by Belter, and pieces of similar quality would have been found only in the homes of America's wealthiest citizens. The robust design of the furniture is carried over in several other elements of the room, including the spectacular marble mantelpiece, the heavily patterned carpet, and the carved-wood door surround. A formal parlor of such elegance and richness would have been used by the lady of the house for entertaining.

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The stunning Gothic Revival library came from the house designed by Frederick Clarke Withers in 1859 for the banker Frederick Deming (1787–1860) and his family. Withers was the one-time associate of the famed architectural theoretician Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), who popularized the Gothic Revival style. During the mid-nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival style was considered particularly appropriate for libraries, because it was reminiscent of scholarly preserves such as medieval monasteries and universities. Before this time, private libraries had been the exclusive domain of wealthy gentlemen of an academic bent, but mass production of inexpensive, clothbound books brought the possession of a good library within reach of almost any middle-class family in the 1850s. Less formal than the best parlor, the library became the family sitting room—a place for relaxation and even coziness.

This library is enlivened by contrasting wood tones, the floor is striped in alternating oak and walnut boards, and the wainscoting is walnut with chestnut panels. The original paint scheme is exactly replicated here.

The room is meant to illustrate how an upper-middle-class family library might have been furnished. Unlike the Greek and Rococo Revival rooms, the Gothic Revival library is not furnished with a suite of furniture. The pieces in the room were made by a number of different New York City cabinetmakers from the early 1850s through the mid-1860s, illustrating various interpretations of the style.

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The Renaissance Revival Parlor originated on the handsome estate of Jedediah Wilcox, built between 1868 and 1870. Valued at the time at the significant sum of $125,000, the house was constructed in the Second Empire style, which was thought to indicate affluence and authority, as well as a cosmopolitan outlook. The Wilcox house was slated for demolition in 1968, and the Museum was able to acquire the front parlor, the rear parlor, and the formal front hall, including the magnificent staircase, as well as the rear parlor's suite of furniture. Together they represent the first known instance of a nineteenth-century American designer, Augustus Truesdell, overseeing and maintaining a consistent idea throughout every aspect of a home's decoration.

This installation re-creates the rear parlor, complete with an elegant suite of furniture and a matching over mantel mirror, window cornices, lighting fixtures, and marble mantel. While today this style is generally called Renaissance Revival, the furniture makers of its day believed they were following French models and reinterpreting designs fashionable during the reign of Louis XVI. The room's beautifully painted ceiling features rosettes with trompe-l'oeil floral bouquets, all accurately copied from the original parlor. The dramatic twelve-armed chandelier, produced by New York City lighting firm Mitchell, Vance, and Company, picks up aspects of the design motifs found throughout the room.

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This stair hall comes from the Metcalfe residence, built in 1884 for Erzelia Metcalf, the recent widow of Buffalo's First National Bank president, James Harvey Metcalfe. The Metcalf residence was the first house built in Buffalo by the famous New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.

The notion of a stair hall, or living hall, as a room essential to a house became popular around the time the house was built. Whereas earlier formal halls had been designed to separate unwelcome visitors from the private family rooms, the Victorian stair hall drew guests right into the heart of a home, with its cozy inglenook furnished with benches on either side of a glowing hearth. This change in design may have reflected the trend toward a less rigidly defined class structure that was taking place in society in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The interior of the Metcalf residence differed from many of the more expensive homes of the day in that the McKim, Mead and White attempted to design it with convenience, utility, and economy in mind. Paneled in white oak, this stair hall features carved and turned decorative motifs inspired by a range of sources, including Moorish, Japanese, and Italian Renaissance examples. Light from the leaded-glass windows at the landing spills out across the first few steps and hall floor, giving dimension to the Japanese latticework and delicately turned balusters.

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Completing the tour of the American Period Rooms, the Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) living room exemplifies one of Wright's most important contributions to modern architecture: the idea of dynamic spatial continuity. The room is not a single volume but a series of levels. The oak furniture and other objects in the room have been installed using both a floor plan that Wright made for the room and a photograph of the interior that appeared in a 1942 survey of Wright's work. To the architect, the exterior and interior design and the furnishings of a house were all part of an integrated whole.

This room—originally the living room in a country house for Mr. and Mrs. Francis W. Little—allows visitors to truly experience a pleasure that is rarely available to the public: a Wright-designed domestic space. Installed in the Museum as a freestanding pavilion, much as it was on its original site, it is a complete work, designed by an artist with a highly individual aesthetic.