It has to be the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford: http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

It's just cluttered enough to feel like home. I've visited it more times than any other museum (except the Manx Museum, but that's only because of where I live). And I've grown very attached to the collection there: a witch-in-a-bottle; dolls stuck full of great big nails; miniature huskie team; earliest example of a gun; currency as big as a table; a bracelet made of beetles' legs. If my house was big enough, that's the kind of junk I'd fill it with.

Though if I had to live in museum, I'd be tempted by the British Museum for sheer variety and scale. Impressive building too.

Or maybe the Natural History Museum. If I was feeling lonely I could always have a chat with the brontosuarus (or what ever it is).

It apparently has not changed all that much in 8,000 years - going from the diorama to back outside, you immediately notice that the place is still a howling, barren wilderness.

So that's the exhibit that feels most like home.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms group in the Art Institute of Chicago (with approppriate scaling, of course) is the one exhibit where I could happily live.

Now I'm imagining a crowd of eensy castle-dwellers scrabbling up the stairwell to get on the model train exhibit. Of course, since the Chicago Tribune was the home of William Donahey's Teenie Weenies, maybe that's not a strange idea at all.

(And Don Markstein's fine article misses a remarkable fact about the comic: when Donahey had his little people construct some kind of engineering project -- once they had to right a model boat -- he'd mock up the device to make sure they could actually do it.)

I beg to differ. It was E.L Konisberg.

I volunteer at the interpretive center at the Falls of the Ohio State Park in Indiana, and that center and the Clark Cabin which is connected with it often seem like home already.

I could also live in the "Small Mexico Village" rooms at the Children's Museum of Houston, the exhibit very realistic and it's a fun place to play. Among the many things to do you can write in Spanish at school, make sandals, drive the VW bus, or pretend to make tortillas.

I think I'm only attached to those places because I have been there often. Other museums haven't imprinted on me enough yet to call “home”.

Oh, those pesky quotes, I just can’t seem to shake them.

There was a huge, carved ivory eagle that was on display in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History when I was in my teens. I still dream of it, from time to time. It's no longer on display, hasn't been for a very long time. I assume they decided that it wasn't really natural history, and it wasn't really art, and tucked away somewhere just in case somebody figured out what it was. If I could wander around their basement, maybe I'd find my old friend. And if I were ethereal, I could do what I have always wanted to do, which is climb on his back and stroke his feathers. There is odd magic in the secret places which hold treasure. I imagine him luminous in the dark, ivory light coming not so much from him but from around him. But maybe he wouldn't recognize me from so long ago, with him on one side of the glass and me on the other.

Forry! Didn't know you were here.

... which also has the advantage of having originally been a house.

No? Then I'm sure I can find a comfortable corner at Beamish - with maybe a London pied-à-terre at the Geffrye.

There is that, as well.

Of course, though, then there's the Robert Lehman gallery in the MET, which is set up to look like an opulent living room. Very Dorian Grey.

As a Bostonian I would counsel against the Gardner. Mrs. Jack's proscription against ever moving anything gets old, fast.

museum of science fiction/erotic museum somewhere.

Must they be separate? The MITSFS probably has the world's largest accessible collection of off-color SF....

The Ringling is more than the art museum. The Ringling campus includes the Ringlings' house, Cà d'Zan (a wonderful 1920s Mediterranean-style mansion that was my first taste of living-breathing-history and glamor). There's also the Circus Museum, which had a fabulous "backstage at the circus" setup; you can (or could; it's been a long time since I went) wander through the tents and wagons and see the makeup boxes and costume repair bits and camp cookery scattered around. And, finally, there's a theater (the Asolo). Oh, and the grounds are lovely.

I could live at the Ringling.

And as the Last Man, he'd have made a great janitor.

As someone mentioned, though, I think I'd rather live in a library. There's a Tibor Fischer short story about living in the Cambridge University Library, which would suit me fine. It's not very pretty, but the *books*...!

I think they have a good idea; I'd love to have the stained glass courtyard as a part of my home.

This sounds like an odd choice until you've been in my living room...

I went to UCSD for three years, much of which I spent wandering the Park, and my grandparents met in the House of Hospitality. So clearly it already does belong to me. If I can only convince the guards of that...

My mom was raised in a General Electric home of the future after GE was done with it. It was pretty nice, for late thirties technology.

And there used to be the Hickmott wing of the Hartford Atheneum, funded and furnished by a distant relative. That got closed when the funds ran out.

So I'm somewhat predisposed to museum life.

Still, if I had to pick my favorite museum exhibit to live in, I'd want to live in the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It's got the best toys. I wouldn't mind having the Japanese Garden from the Metropolitan attached to it.