The Old Town is full of nineteenth-century merchant houses, and this is the one to go inside. Balabanov House was built for a wealthy trader in the 1850s, demolished in the twentieth century and rebuilt in the 1980s from drawings and photographs — a reconstruction, which the museum says plainly. What it reconstructs is the Plovdiv Revival style at full volume: a symmetrical timber facade with an overhanging upper floor, painted ceilings, and a central salon two storeys high.
The ground floor is used as a gallery for contemporary Bulgarian painting, which sounds like a mismatch and is not. The upper floor is furnished as the house would have been, with the carved wooden ceilings that are the real reason to come — the one in the main salon is a sunburst about four metres across.
It has the best acoustics of any of the house museums and hosts chamber concerts through the year; the summer programme is worth checking on arrival. Combined tickets with the other Old Town houses are sold at the door and are much better value than paying separately.