Otis House Museum

17 Best Museums in Boston

"The rare Federal-era building in the city to still have its original interiors almost entirely intact, Otis House owes its impressive neoclassical style to Charles Bulfinch—the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Boston starchitect behind many of the grandest homes of Beacon Hill and the Massachusetts State House, too. Over the century-plus that it has been a museum, curators and conservators have filled its remarkably well-preserved interiors with a carefully curated collection of Boston-made eighteenth and nineteenth-century furniture, plus period-perfect reproduction wallpapers, carpets, paint colors, and more. On tours offered Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from June through October, you’ll travel back in time to the world, and social whirl, of lawyer, politician, and real estate developer Harrison Gray Otis, and his wife, consummate hostess and mother of nine little Otises, Sally Foster Otis, who together commissioned Bulfinch to build the house in the mid-1790s. A must for early United States history lovers and classical American architecture junkees." - Elizabeth Wellington, Andrew Sessa