A stroll around Beacon Hill leaves many visitors pining to know what the stately homes look like inside. This grand residence is one of the only places to satisfy that curiosity. The 1804 home, designed by the celebrated architect Charles Bulfinch, holds beautiful antique furnishings, art, carpets, and tapestries collected by several generations of the Nichols family. Its most prominent occupant, Rose Standish Nichols (1872–1960), was a suffragist and a pioneering landscape designer. Her legacy includes not just family heirlooms but objects she brought back from her many travels to the thoroughfare that author Henry James (who lived at no. 131) called “the only respectable street in America.”