Nichols House Museum

This guide to the Nichols House Museum in Boston follows Rose Standish Nichols, who talked her way into an MIT drafting class as a special student in 1899 and moved into this Bulfinch-designed Beacon Hill rowhouse at thirteen. It traces how she turned training from the Cornish art colony and Harvard's Bussey Institute into a paying garden-design business, taking on clients from Newport to California. The physician father who saw patients from a home office downstairs gets his own mention along the way. Look around the parlor for the furniture and textiles she chose herself.