Cousins Family Apartment

It's hard to find a more immersive experience in time travel than the Strawbery Banke Museum, but they wanted to push the envelope a little more. It's expected to walk through a historic house and get to peek at the neatly decorated rooms over low barriers, each neatly arranged like a diorama. In this renovated historic apartment building, the experience comes closer, with realistic reproductions that can be handled and scents of baking bread and florals adding another layer of immersion to the visitor experience.

For the Cousins family apartment, Panoptic created a range of photos and ephemera that closely mimic the kinds of common items that might have accompanied life in the Cousins' household in the 1920s and 30s. Photos of family members in frames, recipe cards splashed across the kitchen counter, a church program left listlessly on a side table next to a family photo album... these small pieces of everyday ephemera are what make the home feel lived in. Scent dispensers disguised as coffee cans and flower frogs suggest recent baking in the kitchen, lavender in the bedroom. In the bedroom, a small pulsing light on Jeri's portrait plaque entices visitors. When pressed, oral histories from Jeri fill the room. Only when absolutely necessary, simple and elegant barriers are installed to protect valuable artifacts on display.

We delighted in finding the most authentic ways to create artifacts that could withstand the trials of visitor use, using a range of materials such as unrippable paper and polycarbonate to elicit paper and glass, and real hardwood and velvet to provide realistic texture. Authenticity was key, and keeping visitors immersed in their time-travel to the 1930s was never sacrificed to create hands-on pieces that will last for years.