In 1849, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer, was appointed manager of the Alapayevsk and Nizhny Neya Metallurgical Plants and moved with his family to Alapayevsk. At that time, Pyotr Tchaikovsky was 9 years old. A year later, he was sent to study in St. Petersburg. The family lived in the house of the managers of the Alapayevsk mining district, built in the 1830s, from 1849 to 1852. It was here that Pyotr's twin brothers, Modest and Anatoly, were born.

The core of the museum's collection consists of musical instruments from the 16th to the 20th centuries, collected by Vera Borisovna Gorodilina, the founder and first director of the museum. V.B. Gorodilina was a music educator, artist, and collector of unique musical instruments, a distinguished cultural worker of the RSFSR, an academician of the Academy of Arts and Crafts named after Demidovs, and an honorary citizen of Alapayevsk.

While working as a piano teacher at the Alapayevsk Music School, she spent a long time gathering materials about the life of P.I. Tchaikovsky in Alapayevsk, making sketches and miniature models of the rooms in the house where the Tchaikovsky family lived. At the same time, she collected a collection of musical instruments from around the world and created their reduced copies.

On May 7, 1965, on the 125th anniversary of the great composer's birth, a memorial room with the exhibition "Tchaikovsky in Alapayevsk" was opened in the building of the House of Pioneers at the initiative of Gorodilina. Later, it became a memorial museum, opened in 1990. Vera Borisovna managed the museum on a voluntary basis from 1965 to 1982.

Today, the museum's exhibition is divided into two sections. The memorial section is dedicated to the life of the Tchaikovsky family in Alapayevsk, where the rooms of the manager's house present documents, personal belongings, and furnishings, including a piano from the "Virt" company. The collection section features musical instruments from the peoples of the world, Europe, Africa, and Asia from the collections of V.B. Gorodilina and musician Konstantin Kovalsky. Many of the presented musical instruments can be played.

The P.I. Tchaikovsky House Museum is part of the association of musical museums and collections in Russia.