Art & the Country House

Art & the Country House is a publication research project by Paul Mellon Centre, which focuses on the collection and display of works of art in situated in eight country houses across Britain, with collections dating from the sixteenth century to the present day. Keepthinking developed a new brand and website for the project, powered by the same Qi installation as its parent website, paul-mellon-centre.com.

Focusing on the representation of all eight houses and their diverse collections, we enabled PMC to interconnect the broad material and introduced pathways to explore them both vertically and horizontally. We provided a comprehensive index page to search across all global content and access details of contributions to the project. The user can choose whether to focus on a single house’s content, or explore and search interrelated content between all of the collections.

The house overlay reveals the eight country houses and functions as a dock for exploring their individual content. We created unique illustrations and accompanying icons for each house to represent them throughout the website.

Essays reveal fascinating insights into the house collections, with eight thematic essays focusing on individual houses and a number of contextual essays to broaden the collection research. Essays tell the stories surrounding the country house collections, with functionality to cite, share and attached downloads. The essays also contain bibliographies, author biographies and imprints to be academically compliant.

Eight films to introduce each country house included in this publication. The films show the architectural beauty of each house and their collections, while also revealing information surrounding their histories through a series of short interviews.

A comprehensive indexing system to present global content in one view for the user to sift through all the material related to their specific input criteria. The index also contains a list of contributors (curators, authors, artists, organisations etc) and links to their contributions.

Our challenges involved finding an integrated user experience solution that can fit amongst the already well-established projects of the Paul Mellon Centre while maintaining its own distinct voice. This project tested our abilities to utilise and manipulate pre-existing infrastructures to accommodate for isolated content and data types. Through careful planning and transparency between Keepthinking and the team at Paul Mellon Centre, we collaborated to reveal an original and fascinating three-dimensional story surrounding British art in the Country House.

As part of unravelling the different art collections, original inventories were discovered. Each inventory has been transcribed and presented digitally to help academic researchers and art historians, helping to build a complete picture of what these collections are and where they travelled to throughout time.

Audiences are invited to provide feedback to assist PMC with future enhancements, clarity and accessibility.