Preserving Longue Vue: Preventative Conservation

For the next few weeks, in addition to our ongoing tornado recover efforts, visitors to Longue Vue may notice that certain rooms are temporarily closed during their tour. 

We’re working both to stabilize these rooms following the storm’s HVAC outage and to practice preventative conservation: the careful, proactive work of protecting Longue Vue’s historic interiors, furnishings, and collections. We are especially focusing on the floors throughout the Main House, including cleaning, buffing, and waxing the historic wood surfaces.

Preventative conservation is the backbone of responsible historic preservation. Rather than waiting for damage to occur, we take deliberate steps to slow the natural processes of deterioration and extend the life of irreplaceable objects and spaces. For our floors, that means carefully removing all furnishings and decorative objects from each room, documenting their condition and exact placement with detailed photographs, deep-cleaning surfaces from baseboards to drapery, and applying a fresh coat of protective wax to the wood. 

Every object that leaves a room is tracked, inspected, and returned exactly where it belongs. Every carpet is assessed and stabilized before it is rolled and stored. The work is methodical, unhurried, and guided by professional collections care standards to ensure the long-term sustainable preservation of Longue Vue. 

We appreciate your understanding as rooms rotate in and out of treatment this summer. Your tour guides can tell you more about what’s happening and why—and we think you’ll find that watching a historic house being cared for is a story worth telling. 

— Molly Hay, senior manager of collections and archives