17 Best Museums in Boston

"Take a trip back in time on a historian-led guided tour of this early-nineteenth-century home at the top of the tony Beacon Hill neighborhood. Designed in 1804 by architect Charles Bulfinch—who also did the Massachusetts Statehouse just down the street—the Federalist-style four-story brick pile became home in 1885 to Dr. Arthur Nichols, his wife, Elizabeth, and their three daughters, Rose, Marian, and Margaret. The family went on to decorate the house with fashionable Aesthetic Movement, Arts & Crafts, and Colonial Revival pieces collected from within New England and on their travels to Europe. A feminist, suffragist, pacifist, and a renowned garden designer, Rose inherited the place in the 1920s, after her parents died, and her salons became famous for their deep discussions about the hot topics of the day. She specified in her will that the house would become a museum, and visitors today will find it nearly exactly as she left it, filled with the furniture, accessories, art, books, and ephemera gathered by the family, and especially by her, over the decades. It serves as a fascinating portrait of an iconoclastic woman." - Elizabeth Wellington, Andrew Sessa