The three-storey house, being one of the first residential houses in Shusha, belonged to the 19th-century Azerbaijani poet Khurshidbanu Natavan. During Soviet rule, it served as a music and art school, and later, as a house-museum dedicated to Natavan. The building was heavily damaged when the Armenian forces captured Shusha in 1992, during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, while the Azerbaijani authorities accused the Armenian forces of looting the building.