ONDON -- THE holiday lights burn extra-bright in Mayfair, dazzling from the windows of the chic, expensively turned-out couturiers that line the streets of this most fashionable area of London. They seduce the eye so effectively that it takes some effort to look above the street level of the shops and notice what remains of the red brick 18th- and 19th- century terraces these buildings used to be.

But anyone who does will see, in Brook Street, high above a row of dress shops, two commemorative plaques for former residents across the centuries. At No. 23 there's Jimi Hendrix. And at No. 25, next door, George Frideric Handel. Interesting neighbors.

Hendrix didn't live there long, and it's an issue in the neighborhood whether he should have a plaque at all. But Handel is another matter. He was there for 36 years: an eternity for someone active in the 18th- century music world. Baroque composers, not unlike their latter-day rock counterparts, were famous for unstable lives. They traveled across mountains, seas and battlefields in search of work or patronage. And Handel did his fair share of traveling, venturing from his German hometown, Halle, to tour Italy before he arrived in London, drawn there by the allure of its commercial wealth. As an 18th-century rhyme put it, "In France and Italy there's something to be learned; in London, something to be earned."

But having tasted London life, he settled, and 25 Brook Street remained his home until his death in 1759. The house then passed to his manservant, John du Burk, who also inherited Handel's clothes and bought his furniture (for the sum of £45). From circumstantial evidence it seems likely that du Burk ran the house as some kind of private hotel. But by the beginning of the 20th century it had been turned into an art shop; the interiors were stripped and remodeled by an owner who considered central London property "far too valuable to be left to rot because some genius of a past age happened to have lived there." By the end of the century it had been bought by an insurance company, which leased the ground floor as a shop and used the upper floors as office space. But a campaign was already under way to reclaim the property and turn it into a Handel museum. It was organized by Stanley Sadie, a Handel scholar and the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

The insurance company was sympathetic but unable to agree to a deal, so for a decade there was deadlock. Finally, by way of compromise, it was agreed that Mr. Sadie's Handel House Trust could have the upper floors at a token rent, together with part of the house next door, leaving the ground floor for commercial retail. And on that basis the Handel House — the only museum ever made to a composer in London — opened recently, quietly but stylishly, at a renovation cost of $6 million, and with an immediate turnover of more than 200 visitors a day. Which is twice the number anyone expected.

"You only have to see those attendance figures to know that there's a real curiosity, now, about Handel," the curator, Jacqueline Riding, said. "And not just the Handel of `Messiah' and the `Water Music,' both of which were composed in this house, but the Handel of the operas, too. There was a time when Handel's operas were curiosities. Now they're repertory. And for the most part they were written here as well, which makes this house the source of an extraordinary body of work, not just in quality but quantity."

The house itself is not vast. And since the ground floor in front remains a dress shop, visitors must enter at the back, through a small alleyway and courtyard that would once have been the route of tradesmen and servants. So you enter with humility — and find yourself confronted by the decidedly un-Handelian sight of a high-tech elevator to take you to the third floor, where the tour begins with a video introduction by Christopher Hogwood, Charles Mackerras and other luminaries of the latter-day Handel revival.

"We took a policy decision," Ms. Riding said, "that whatever was museum packaging as opposed to the house itself would be unapologetically modern and we would use whatever we could lay our hands on in the way of contemporary technology."

But as you realize when you get your bearings, the museum packaging is confined either to the bits of the house built onto the back long after Handel lived there or to the rooms the trust has taken over in the house next door. With the original 18th- century parts of No. 25 itself, the idea has been to recreate a true Handelian environment, as close as possible to the way it would have been when he acquired the lease in 1723.

It was a brand new building at the time, part of a speculative development designed to link Grosvenor Square to the west with Hanover Square to the east and clearly intended for occupancy by the prosperous middle classes, although by 18th-century standards the amount of space in each house was fairly modest. No. 25 had a street frontage three windows wide, and a height of three main floors plus basement (for the kitchen) and attic (for the servants). Each floor had one substantial room, together with a sort of closet at the back and a linking staircase. And as Handel arranged things, that gave him just one bedroom, with dressing room, at the top; a rehearsal room, with composing room, in the middle; and a parlor on the ground floor, where a servant sold concert tickets and subscriptions at the door. It was in every sense a working house, so the dress shop now on the ground floor is not so inappropriate.

Handel was 38 when he moved in, and taking the house must have reflected the confidence he felt in his new appointment as composer to the Chapel Royal with a state pension of £400. For a foreigner with a thick German accent, he had done well for himself, perhaps assisted by the fact that the throne of England was also occupied by a foreigner with a thick German accent, George I. But as a foreigner Handel was technically unable to own real estate, so he rented No. 25. And it is interesting that when he did eventually adopt English nationality in 1727, he continued to rent rather than buy, presumably because the commercial vagaries of staging opera in London left his finances uncertain.

But circumstantial evidence also suggests that he didn't take too great an interest in his surroundings. He was a bachelor and, except for servants, he lived alone with gradually failing eyesight. From the inventory of furnishings compiled on his death, it looks as though he may never have changed his curtains in 36 years. (The ones left on the windows were of a kind long out of fashion.) And from paint samples taken during the restoration of the house in readiness for its new life as a museum, it seems that he may never have changed the interior color scheme.

After scraping through 28 layers of paint accumulated over the centuries, building archaeologists have concluded that when Handel took the house, its entire inner space was, in the manner of new developments, painted the same color: battleship gray. And from the encrustation of grease on the gray, they think it must have stayed that way for a very long time, except for the addition of chocolate brown on the door frames, to hide the inevitable marks of wear and tear.

In Handel's time the gray would have been broken up by pictures on the walls. His furniture inventory lists 80 prints and oils, including at least one portrait of the man himself and two Rembrandts. Now there is not much to decorate the walls. The house is still acquiring contents and has managed to obtain only a single picture that was definitely there when the composer was. As for the furniture, there is nothing you could call original: just pieces "of the period."

But there is a fair attempt at recreating Handel's bedroom (where he died) with an impressive 1720's canopy bed very like the one known to have been in the post-mortem inventory, reupholstered in the crimson fabric the inventory describes. And in the rehearsal room is a double-manual harpsichord (a modern copy of an 18th-century Ruckers) on which visitors will usually find a keyboard student practicing. The house intends to hire students by the hour, to fill the premises with something approximating the genuine Handelian sound of live music.

"With not so much, yet, in the way of contents, we've had to concentrate on atmosphere, on creating an evocative experience," Ms. Riding said. "And I think we've succeeded. In the past few weeks I've seen people standing in the bedroom or in the small back room where we think Handel did most of his composition, with tears in their eyes. Even though it's not his bed and not his chairs and tables.

"In the big room that we think was used for rehearsals, it's fair to assume that there would have been music coming out of there day and night. Handel must have been a noisy neighbor. And it would have been crowded, too, because apart from the performers he brought into the house, there would have been invited guests who came to listen. It's why the furniture inventory listed over 40 chairs."

The reliance on atmosphere is not just because the house owns none of Handel's actual furnishings, but also because the world knows strangely little about Handel's actual life. He left few letters, no diaries. And the dearth of documentary evidence about his day-to-day affairs (other than composition) is in fact suspicious for so public a figure, a celebrity whose statue graced the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

It suggests that somebody erased the evidence, perhaps to hide the fact that Handel was gay. It's only speculation, but there is a curious emphasis in the way his earliest biographers stress his celibacy. We're told, for example, that he had "no female attachments." And his onetime residency with the Duke of Chandos raises certain questions if, as some scholars believe, the duke kept a gay household on his estate at Edgware.

The truth is that we know very little about how he led his life," Ms. Riding said. "Which is why the Handel House has had to be careful with its statements. We can't unequivocally say Handel was this or that. We can only be less direct and say the evidence suggests. . . . But I think we can safely say he had a quick temper, he could swear in four languages, he was funny, and he liked to eat."

On the eating front, there is a particularly good story about Handel holding a dinner party in the rehearsal room of the house only to disappear into the small back room, where he was found giving a private (and more sumptuous) banquet to himself. One of the guests on that occasion was the stage designer Joseph Goupy, who turned the incident into a cruel caricature of Handel with a pig snout for a nose. It sold in cheap engravings (and large numbers) on the streets of London.

The abiding question with mystery composers is whether we really need to know more than we're told. Handel's legacy, you might say, is his music. Is our understanding of it genuinely enhanced by groping in the dark for the minutiae of what happened behind closed doors at 25 Brook Street? Perhaps not.

But you might also argue that a passionate devotion to a work of art generates a natural desire to know as much as possible about the circumstances that gave rise to it, and the Handel House is thus a valuable resource. And however evocative (rather than specific) its appeal, the house is perfectly enchanting, beautifully presented and — yes — curiously affecting. It is a spur to the imagination and, if nothing else, a long-overdue recognition of the role composers play in society.

Handel was not only a great composer, he was a great Londoner: a man of influence and of his time. Those virtues are worth celebrating. And with only two other museums to composers in the whole of Britain — the Holst House in Cheltenham and the Elgar Birthplace in Worcestershire — it's not as though the market is oversubscribed.  

Michael White is a columnist for BBC Music Magazine and writes for The Sunday Telegraph in London.