Preservation Society critically examines house museums and period rooms, sites where home moves beyond idea or concept, becoming a kind of simulated experience. The images use the currency of these spaces — beauty, opulence, claims of historic authority, the voyeuristic allure of entering private spaces of the departed elite — to draw the viewer in. However, upon closer examination, the images reveal and, as photographs, document, the failure of an imaginary world precariously balanced on a veneer of intense control and order. These failures take the form of the artificial, contrived, empty, aloof, and sometimes crude — subtle, yet ominous ruptures that lay bare the ways in which these sites’ desire for authority over time and memory are inherent to their very design. They create a tension between beauty and ugliness, truth and fiction, nostalgia and disillusionment; an antidote to escapism and omission under the guise of history, and creating space for contemplation around the attraction of these sites and spaces like them, and what they actually preserve.