This essay advanced practice in the field of design history by connecting decorative arts scholarship and museology with other fields of design historical studies. Jeremy Aynsley set out to investigate the origins of collecting historical period rooms to be put on display by North American and European museums in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Museums present one particular form of culturally constructed representation and the wider project of the Centre provided a solid context in which to understand the period room as one variant of more general trends. Following research into magazines, catalogues and museum records, Aynsley's essay traces the beginnings of decorative arts museums, historic house museums and folk (living) museums, and explores the boundaries between museums and international exhibitions and the representational strategies employed by specialist retailers and magazine publishers, which developed a parallel interest in the construction of historical styles of room for purchase. Links between three-dimensional and two-dimensional conventions of display are highlighted.

Aynsley examines, in particular, evidence of the use of the term 'period room', which crossed from museums to the commercial sector in the form of popular exhibitions and publishing, and he challenges the assumptions of many commentaries that have offered 'authenticity' as the determining factor, by showing that the construction of such rooms is always highly selective in what it sought to preserve. His research brought together evidence from ethnographic and decorative arts to show similarities and differences in the intentions of those responsible for installing period rooms, including comparison of differences between British (English), Scandinavian and North American attitudes towards the preservation of cultural history.