The museum's most compelling artifact is the structure itself. The Ynchausti-Elizalde building is a bahay na bato - a stone house in the traditional Philippine colonial style - and its survival on Calle Real, Iloilo City's historic commercial street, makes it a physical document of the mercantile culture it now interprets. Walking through its restored rooms, visitors move through the same spaces where Basque traders once tallied abaca shipments, where the Elizalde family once lived above their grocery store, where government auditors once tracked public expenditure. The National Historical Commission of the Philippines took ownership when the Commission on Audit donated the building in 2016, and the restoration that followed, beginning in 2018, preserved the structural character while converting the interior into gallery space. The building's historical marker, unveiled in 2019, acknowledges it as the Bahay Kalakal ng Ynchausti y Compania - the Trading House of Ynchausti and Company.

The museum houses 13 galleries across two floors, and their scope is national rather than local. The ground level traces the history of the building itself and situates Iloilo's role as an economic center within the broader narrative of Philippine commerce. Displays include antiques from across the archipelago: century-old paper currency from the Japanese and American eras, encased in glass, tells the story of occupation through the money people carried. Upstairs, the galleries expand outward from Iloilo to address the evolution of the Philippine economy as a whole - the pre-colonial trading networks, the Spanish galleon trade, the sugar boom, the American commercial period, and the modern industrial economy. The museum makes an argument through its curation: that the Philippines' economic history is best understood not from Manila but from the provinces where the raw materials were grown, harvested, and shipped.

Ynchausti y Compania was not a minor trading house. Founded in 1816, during the final decades of the Spanish colonial period's most restrictive trade policies, it grew into one of the most diversified commercial enterprises in the Philippines. The Ynchausti and Elizalde families were Basque - part of a distinct Spanish commercial diaspora that wielded influence disproportionate to their numbers in the Philippines. Their company's involvement in abaca, tobacco, sugar, shipping, banking, and hemp meant they touched nearly every sector of the colonial economy. The Iloilo branch, housed in this building, occupied a strategic position: Iloilo's port was the primary export point for sugar and textiles from the Visayas. When the Elizaldes took over in 1934, they maintained the building as both residence and commercial space, embedding domestic life within the architecture of trade.

The Museum of Philippine Economic History does not stand alone on Calle Real. The street itself is a living archive of Philippine commercial architecture - contiguous rows of Beaux-Arts, neoclassical, and Art Deco buildings that collectively form one of the most intact colonial-era commercial streetscapes in Southeast Asia. The street's ensemble has been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List, recognizing it as a site of outstanding universal value. The museum, housed in one of Calle Real's oldest surviving commercial buildings, serves as both a stop on the street and an interpretation of the forces that built it. From the sugar boom of the 1850s through the American commercial era to the postwar period, Calle Real was where money changed hands, deals were struck, and the physical evidence of commerce solidified into stone and iron. The museum turns that evidence inward, making the street's own history legible to the people who walk it.