The museum Ett Hem (A Home) provides a cultural-historical representation of a bygone domestic interior. The museum was established by way of a testamentary disposition by the married couple Alfred and Hélène Jacobsson, on 18 February 1925, according to which the house at the address Hämeenkatu 30 was donated to the Åbo Akademi University Foundation, with the stipulation that their home, situated in the two-floor stone building, would remain unchanged as a museum called "Ett hem". After Mrs Hélène Jacobsson passed away in 1928 and Alfred Jacobsson in 1931, the museum was opened to the public on 29 May 1932 and was closed only after the Winter War broke out in 1939; the collections were then partly relocated for safety. However, when peace was restored in 1945, the museum could not be reopened, since the entire upper floor of the building had to be let for other purposes due to the dire circumstances of the post-war period. When the facilities eventually were made available again in 1954, it was observed that the stone building was badly damaged by age and displacement of the foundations. The city's authorities condemned the building for demolition in 1955.

The museum reopened at Piispankatu 14 in 1965 in a wooden building, which, although far more modest than the demolished Jacobsson stone house, still represented the same architectural period and the same upper-class cultural environment. There were many similarities between the houses in their disposition of the rooms, and the building in Piispankatu is designed by the same architect, Charles Johnsson, who had made the original drawings for the stone building in Hämeenkatu. The current interiors correspond largely with the interiors in the original Jacobsson home museum.