Research
Illustration from Mrs Jane Gaugain The Lady's work book (1842). The design for the ‘brioche cushion, or footstool’ was used to make a reproduction for Vaucluse House.
The library of the Historic Houses Trust, The Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, is the starting point for research about the properties of the Historic Houses Trust. The library has copies of conservation management plans, interpretation and museum management plans and archaeological reports relating to HHT properties. It holds a run of Insites, the magazine of the Historic Houses Trust, and copies of all HHT exhibition catalogues, guide books and other publications. Details can be found in the library catalogue.
Some information about aspects of the furnishings of some of the HHT’s house museums, as well as details of the wallpaper, floor coverings and garden ornament collections of the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, can be found in our Museum collections catalogue. Access to the pictures collection – paintings and drawings of some of our properties, collections of historic photographs – is available through the pictures catalogue.
The research collections of the library also provide a specialist resource for scholars, heritage and conservation practitioners and museum professionals nationally and internationally. The collection includes rare architectural and furniture pattern books from the 18th and 19th centuries, a rich collection of 19th century domestic advice manuals and a particularly strong garden history collection. The Colonial plants database, a database of plants known to be available in the colony of New South Wales up until the 1860s, has been developed as a research tool for garden historians and landscape conservationists.
