The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum

This guide to the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum traces the collection's ninety years inside a Kalorama mansion built for George Hewitt Myers, an heir to the Bristol-Myers fortune who bought his first rug as a Yale freshman in 1896. You'll hear how curators worked around chimneys and staircases never meant to hold five thousand years of textiles, and why the university finally moved the collection here in 2011, closing the mansion's chapter as a museum. Listen for the glass and limestone atrium around you, built to give the objects room the old fireplaces never allowed.