Sir John Soane's Museum, London

Sir John Soane's Museum is the former home of architect John Soane, now a house museum beside Lincoln's Inn Fields. Its rooms preserve an extraordinary mixture: Soane's project drawings and models appear alongside paintings, sculpture, antiquities, and objects gathered over many years. The collection includes works by Canaletto, Hogarth, Turner, Reynolds, and Piranesi, as well as the Egyptian sarcophagus of Seti I.

There are over 30,000 architectural drawings here, and a collection of 9,000 drawings by Robert Adam is held in the study centre. Look at the building's courtyards and the column assembled from fragments of architecture in the monument court. These spaces were restored, along with interiors whose historic colour schemes and arrangements of objects were brought back.

The museum's survival rests on a remarkable family dispute. Soane secured a private Act of Parliament in 1833 so that, after his death in 1837, his house and collections would pass to trustees for the nation rather than to his son George. The arrangement required the museum to preserve the house as closely as possible to the condition Soane left behind. That makes this not simply a collection, but an architectural experiment preserved as its creator intended.