My Own Private Museum

Museum hopping is another hobby of mine—I'm a card-carrying member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So, in another effort to combine my interests with miniatures, I've assembled my own private museum in my living room. Here I'm showing a view of the six-floor structure (bought as a holder for CDs and DVDs), plus a shot of one of the floors.

In the long view you can see the whole building, which is four feet tall.

On the ground floor is a gift shop in process, with a few special pieces for sale on the shelves. The piece on the lower right, bottom shelf, is the fancy top of a perfume bottle. In front of the information desk is a holder (the plastic cap from a razor) that contains copies of a flyer I made using a greatly reduced image of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."

Every decent museum has a café, and mine is on the second floor. It features Toulouse Lautrec posters, tables made from pizza cover inserts (see my first blog, in May for details), and assorted baked goods. The counters are made from small Lucite boxes that you find in any container store or all-purpose drug store.

The next three floors have paintings, furniture, and sculpture. The "carpet" on the third floor is the back cover of an art bulletin. The "hard wood" on the fourth floor was downloaded from the Internet and glued in place. The black border is from a roll of an adhesive pattern that I've had since the days of rub-ons.

My museum is unique in that I can display all my favorite pieces, no matter which real museum owns them. The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all come together in a corner of my living room.

The second photo shows a close-up of the fifth floor. The sculpture is made from cardboard cutouts. One interesting feature is the back wall. What you see looks like a doorway leading to a courtyard beyond, but it is simply one piece of cardboard glued to the back wall of the room, giving the false impression of three dimensions.

For your convenience there's a restroom on the top floor, next to the storage area.

Next week I'll be heading for a real museum trip, to New York City. There's no better place to satisfy a museum craving. During moments of calmness between breathtaking views of master paintings and Tiffany windows, I'll be taking notes with ideas on how to improve my home collection.

Perhaps a roof garden like the one that graces the top of the Met? It will be hard to reproduce Central Park below, but I can give it a try.