The Dutch East India Company built the bungalow during the colonial era, when the Coromandel Coast was a contested trading frontier. For decades the building housed heritage artifacts from the Kalingandhra region, the cultural zone stretching along northern coastal Andhra Pradesh. In 1991, Chief Minister N. Janardhana Reddy inaugurated it as the Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation Museum. The transformation from colonial relic to public institution was a deliberate act of reclamation. Commissioner Sameer Sarma and Mayor D. V. Subba Rao gathered antiques and heirlooms from the royal families of the region, including the Vijayanagaram Samsthanam, the Kirlampudi Estate in Bobbili, and the Jaipore family of Odisha. The result was a collection drawn not from archaeological expeditions but from the parlors and armories of the people who had shaped this coastline for generations.

In 2004, the Eastern Naval Command requested use of the renovated Dutch bungalow for a Maritime Museum, and an agreement was struck. The ten rooms now devoted to naval history hold weapons, navigation instruments, aviation displays, and ice models depicting naval combat operations. A statue of Lord Varuna, the Vedic god of the oceans, greets visitors in the entrance foyer. But walk past the maritime wing and into the Archaeological Section, and the timeline leaps backward by two millennia. Stone sculptures from the 1st through 16th centuries CE line the gallery walls: Buddha images in Bhumisparsha and Abhaya mudras from Bavikonda and Thotlakonda, Jain figures of Vardhamana Mahavira and Parshvanatha, Shaivite carvings of Ganesha and Bhairava, and Vaishnavite bronzes recovered from Simhachalam and Bhogapuram. The juxtaposition is startling and somehow appropriate for a port city where Buddhist monks, Hindu dynasties, Dutch traders, and Indian naval officers have all left their mark.

Among the museum's most revealing artifacts are its inscriptions. A stone tablet in Tamil characters dated to 1083 CE records something remarkable: the military general of Kulothunga, the Chalukya-Chola king who controlled the region in the 11th century, renamed Visakhapatnam to Kulothunga Chola Pattanam. The city's current name eventually reasserted itself, but the inscription is a reminder of how thoroughly dynastic power could reshape a place's identity. Copper plates from the Eastern Ganga dynasty tell similar stories of territory and patronage. The Devakavadakuru plates of Raja Raja Devendra Varma, dated 1076 CE, record the gift of several villages to subordinate Ayya Chiefs. Another set, the Munjeru Copper plates from the 9th century CE, document a gift of an entire village to a Brahmin family. Each inscription is a window into the medieval economy of coastal Andhra, where loyalty was bought with land and recorded in metal.

The Heritage Museum's upper floors belong to a more recent but no less vivid past. The first floor holds an art gallery donated by the Abburi Kalakshetram, with paintings by regional artists, Japanese dolls, old cameras and gramophones, and works by the celebrated artist Adavi Bapiraju. The second floor is where the museum turns theatrical. Life-size oil portraits of the Maharajas of Vijayanagaram, Bobbili, and Jaipur line the western wall, their painted eyes surveying a room filled with swords, guns, pistols, and other armory from the noble families who once ruled this stretch of coast. On the eastern side, old black-and-white photographs of Visakhapatnam offer a ghostly contrast: the same streets, the same harbor, the same hills, but emptied of the modern city that has grown up around them.