Cotton Color doll house

The (closed) Club Little House swap produced some delightful hand made doll house miniatures. See the Flickr group photo pool here, or a charming photoset with a china doll gravely inspecting the offerings here. A delicious shabby chic modern doll house from Japan has a gallery, Cotton Color here. Make sure you click on each picture to see several more.

Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House being packed up in the Lutyens drawing room where it had been being built for two years, in preparation for its move to Windsor Castle. The entire facade rises so the house can be viewed.

If you want to take a visit to the really grand end of town, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was seen as a celebration of English craft and skill, particularly after so many people (and thus their skills) were lost in the Great War. It took years to assemble, featured the work of hundreds of the famous and the unknown, and remains an immensely popular attraction at Windsor Castle. Noted architect Lutyens insisted on things that worked (the taps in every bathroom, working lifts/elevators - and a gramaphone that involved the work of 70 people). Read an illustrated article here.

While historical dolls’ houses seem to be the most popular among miniaturists, it is the ones that record their ‘present day’, whether a wealthy upper class English house of the 1920s (Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House) or those which may result from the Little House swap which hold historical fascination as documents of their time and the ways in which people lived. The late Faith Eaton, a noted dolls’ house collector and historian from Britain, played as a child in the 1940s with a house which featured tape on the windows, a doll dressed as an air raid warden and accessories including a home-made gas mask (this one, Church Hill House, adapted from a commercially made house, is illustrated in her book, The ultimate dolls’ house book - see below).

The Historic Houses Trust of NSW curated an exhibition at Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney of Australian dolls’ houses in 2000. They found little that was grand, and much that showed everyday inventiveness and the creative reuse of humble materials such as butter boxes. There was a book of the exhibition, Dolls’ Houses in Australia 1870-1950 (available here), and there are a few images here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 3:47 pm and is filed under historic crafts, home+children. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.