In spring 2022, we paid a social call to our friends at the Newark Museum of Art. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were already hard at work on the renovation and preservation of their largest collection object; The Ballantine House. As the museum team walked us through the space, our heads were swimming with ideas for creating a new Ballantine experience. A few months later, we were thrilled to be invited back to help advance the interpretive plan for the space and ponder the question, “What does a Victorian mansion have to say to Newark in 2023?”
We always work with, not for our clients, so during the first phase of the project we teamed with the amazing museum staff to expand on their early ideas. We came away with a handful of key messages to help guide our design decisions for the final visitor experience. We decided to focus our story on the City of Newark as an industrial center with a wide ranging and specialized workforce of skilled craftspeople. The City of Newark’s pride is palpable and leveraging the fact that Newarkers built the mansion and many of the architectural components in it felt like an important and relevant topic for local audiences. When the house was built, the city was ethnically, racially, and economically diverse but a still segregated place. We also chose to emphasize that the house was the domain of powerful women; Mrs. Ballantine and her daughter Alice, who exerted the most influence on its construction, decoration, and daily function as a home. Overall, we wanted to ensure that the Ballantine House felt not only of and by Newark, but also for the community today.
We knew we couldn’t do it alone so, in true TEA style, we assembled a dream team of our Creative Partners (Colorbox Industries, Drumminhands Design, Caroline Herr, Public Eye Productions, and Corbett Sparks), to make the team’s ideas a reality in the space. The goal of each new experience was to make the house more relevant and inviting to a diverse population of Newark residents. The museum staff amplified the visitor experience by creating a series of installations by contemporary, and mostly local, artists of color on the second floor of the house.
Welcoming Everyone
One of the unique challenges of the house is that visitors do not enter it through the front door. Instead, they find their way into the home via an attached museum hallway at the back of the building. We worked with the museum to develop a new introductory experience in the interstitial space between the galleries and the house that gives visitors a sense of what it would be like to walk through the front door in 1885.
Visitors enter onto a floor covered with a giant period map of Newark, placing them in the community and giving locals the opportunity to find their neighborhood on the old street grid. The map serves as the canvas for a lighting system that highlights locations of interest in the city. Meanwhile, a coordinated slide show compares historical and contemporary images of each featured location.
Most visitors encounter the house toward the end of their museum visit, when they might be tired or short on time. We wanted to create an introductory experience that provided moments of rest and contemplation, but most importantly got visitors excited about extending their journey into the house. We wanted to make it feel like you were walking through the front door. We worked with local filmmaker Scott Sinkler to produce a compelling fly through video that includes drone footage of the house exterior and a sweeping one shot sequence of the interior that captures the gorgeous space. In essence it works like the trailer to a film, enticing visitors and getting them excited about exploring the real thing. The house is the main character of the film, brought to life by actors in period costumes moving through the space, providing a sense of what the house looked like and how it functioned. Check out the entire video here.
As visitors enter the home, a three dimensional graphic designed by Colorbox Industries invites them to Look, Listen and Play throughout the house and an adjacent map details all of the interactive experiences that they will encounter. The house is filled with sumptuous surfaces, all made with a wide range of beautiful materials, so we created a touch station that encourages visitors to get it all out their systems before going in!
Made By Newark, For Newark
Just as skilled craftspeople from the area originally built the house, the museum engaged local advisors and contractors to complete the extensive restoration and conservation work. We designed two touchscreen interactives that document the restoration with process videos, before and after images of the work completed, and short worker cameos. Visitors are encouraged to sit and learn more about all of the incredible work that got the house looking so good.
In an effort to activate the spaces even further, we created soundscapes for the billiard room, reception room, library, boudoir, and a few of the fireplaces. Visitors encounter sounds like the crack of billiard balls breaking, tea cups tinkling, period piano music, a pen writing at a desk, horse pulled carriages working their way down the street, and the crackle of a warm fire.
In addition to the ambient layers of sound in the space, we installed a secret old-timey phone near the front door. Visitors can lift the receiver to hear interesting dialogue about the Ballantines and some of their potential house guests.
The Ballantine House is adjacent to the front entrance of the museum, but many folks in the neighborhood walk by it without realizing that it is open for their enjoyment. We wanted to develop a simple and fun way to enliven the outside of the house and catch the attention of passersby. To accomplish this, we activated some of the front windows by placing multi-layered vinyl silhouettes of the house interior. The playful graphic adds warmth and dimensionality to the shuttered windows and offers an element of surprise and delight that makes the house more inviting.
The house has an additional visitor entrance on the second floor featuring an installation of collections objects that were made in the city. It is called Made in Newark and the space celebrates the hometown pride of a diverse community, local crafts people, and important Newark industries. We worked with the team to create new introductory orientation panels and a fun audio experience that highlights the wide range of musical talent that has come out of Newark. In this Listening Lounge, visitors are encouraged to pick a record from the display wall and place it next to the turntable in the reproduction mid-century modern living room. The record player then starts to spin and the room is filled with the sounds of Queen Latifah, Whitney Houston, Paul Simon, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughn, Lords of the Underground, and others. This audio activation enlivens the space and seamlessly transforms a “normal” museum gallery into a contemporary lounge space that connects the past to contemporary artists.
During our many conversations about the new Ballantine experience, we made a number of recommendations about the gallery layout and design that helped make the spaces more accessible, unified, and visitor friendly. We worked with the team to create new visitor paths in two rooms that were previously blocked by barriers, encouraged more seating, suggested installing fewer objects in the collections galleries, helped conceive new lighting to illuminate some of the amazing stained glass in the space, and recommended using a vinyl reproduction of the plaster wall treatment to create a more seamless transition between the second floor galleries and the second floor house hallway. We took a holistic approach to this work, balancing considerations for the visitor experience with the conservation and security requirements needed to help protect the house and other collections objects.
We loved working with the museum staff on this new vision for the space. It feels welcoming, relevant, and fun. It was so exciting to attend the opening reception and see hundreds of community members pouring into the house over the course of the night. And of course, if you know me and my side hobby, it felt pretty cool to toast the team with a Ballantine Ale!
