The Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home. Historic New England, Eustis Estate, Milton, MA

This engaging exhibition told the stories of four men—“bachelors”—who devoted themselves to designing their homes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New England. The exhibition beautifully displayed well-selected objects from the men’s homes and contextualized them with archival materials. An eloquent, witty accompanying book devotes chapters to each of their stories. All the homes are open to the public and each one organized related tours during the exhibition’s run. The Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, was the appropriate setting for the exhibition. Its Aesthetic-era interiors of 1878 both complemented these tales of designed interiors and were a foil to them because several of the men examined emerged from the Aesthetic movement and then espoused the Colonial Revival. Rather than anachronistically categorizing its subjects as homosexual, gay, or queer, they are situated in late nineteenth-century “bachelor culture,” which celebrated unmarried men and homosocial life within carefully crafted, comfortable, highly designed domiciles....