Residence organ

[1] Their use can be traced as far back as the 16th century where Henry VIII of England owned more than a dozen residence organs, as did many members of his nobility.

The lengthy pipework of the low registers in a church organ simply doesn't fit into a home, and so devices such as a quint, a Haskell bass, and a stopped pipe are employed to achieve the same sound but with more compact mechanisms.

A four-manual organ was built in Blenheim Palace in 1891 by the Willis company, for example, and such things were symbols of ostentation and opulence on the parts of their owners.

Right at the start of the century the paper-roll playing mechanisms of the pianola were incorporated into residence organs, which had the side-effect of eliminating the profession of residence organist, requiring the operator to do no more than operate the organ stops and expression pedals (which, in its turn, was eliminated within a decade, that too being encoded onto the paper roll itself).

There has been a "purist" backlash against these; and even today one can find companies that will build "real" (i.e. not electronic) residential organs, customized for individual homes.