During the period when Player Pianos were popular in the average home, no fashionable large residence was considered complete until a pipe organ had been installed. The residence instrument is quite different both in sight and sound to its more widely known cousin, the church organ.
Residence organs were built to play orchestral music and rather than possessing the typical majestic tones of an instrument used mainly to lead a large congregation in song, they contained softly-voiced pipes, in imitation of the flutes, the woodwind and string section of the orchestra.

Roll-playing consoles were beautifully designed to match the interior décor of the rooms into which they were installed, and very clever methods of constructions were employed so that the large numbers of pipes (many of them over eight feet long) could be contained within the small spaces available.

The Æolian Company specialised in the construction of these residence organs and devised a special Pipe Organ Roll which would play both the keyboards, and the pedalboard, of a two manual instrument.

Our Æolian Pipe Organ was originally installed in a house in Torquay, and it contained twelve ranks of pipes plus Harp and Chimes. It was moved several times, ending up in a chapel, and was partially vandalised, before it came to the museum. A number of pipe ranks were re-voiced, or exchanged for others more suitable for church use. We have been able to replace some of these pipe ranks with original sets salvaged from other Æolian instruments which have been scrapped.

As well as the standard Æolian console which plays the basic 116-note organ rolls, the museum also has a Duo-Art Pipe Organ player mechanism. This Duo-Art system automatically reproduces the playing of famous organists who recorded the rolls during the 1920s. All the individual notes of tempo and phrasing, the stop changes, and the swell effects of the original performance are encoded in the music rolls.

The Welte Company also built reproducing pipe organs and like all their instruments these were of exceptionally fine quality and workmanship. Like their Ĉolian cousins, these Welte instruments contained subtley-voiced pipework.

The Welte Philarmonic Autograph Organ, Model 4B, was originally installed in a large mansion in Findon near Worthing sometime before the First World War. It contains ten ranks of pipes, and also a large drum which is heard during performances of orchestral overtures and similar pieces.

The Ĉolian-Hammond organ is a very rare item indeed. The Hammond Organ was first marketed in the the mid-1930s and became the worlds first successful electronic organ. In 1938, the Hammond Company joined forces with the Ĉolian-Skinner Organ Company and produce the Ĉolian-Hammond, Model BA player organ. Unfortunately, this unusual combination of pneumatic player mechanism and tone-wheel system of sound generation did not sell in any quantity. Despite its compact size, only 200 or so instruments were produced. Perhaps the price tag of $2,000 was too high? More probably, the potential customers had other matters on their minds at the time, and after the Second World War the advances in tape recording and other recording techniques rendered these relatively large instruments obsolete.