Updating the Rosen House for the 2021 Season
By Roanne Wilcox, Director of the Rosen House
B
eyond the imposing 16th-century Italian gates lies a home, filled with amazing treasures, collected by a couple with a love for music and art and a desire to share it with the world. Ask any of our talented docents: giving a tour of the Rosen House to a firsttime visitor is great fun; there’s always that moment of wide-eyed awe when a visitor realizes what’s actually inside those stucco walls. As we were planning to open the Caramoor grounds in the summer of 2021, we gave a great deal of thought as to how we could welcome visitors back inside the Rosen House while providing a safe experience for all. Our previous tour model, where one docent shares stories about Lucie and Walter Rosen and their collection to a larger group standing shoulder to shoulder, needed some rethinking. Caramoor
We also wanted to update our tours based on some of our visitor’s most commonly asked questions: • Who were Lucie and Walter Rosen? • Why Katonah? • How did the music festival begin? • What happened to the Rosen family? And we gave a lot of thought as to what the tour experience is like for our visitors. After observing hundreds of tours over the past few years, we’ve noticed a few things. Some visitors want to linger a little longer or walk through a little faster than others in their group. Some people want to know more about the Rosen family, while others want to know more about the Renaissance tapestries or intricate stained glass. Some just want to be able to sit down for a moment before continuing on.
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