Miniature Buildings

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Dolls Houses

A big bookshop will have a shelf of books devoted to dolls houses.  Most newsagents will have 2 or more monthly magazines devoted to them.  There is simply a mountain of material on the web. It would be foolish of me to try and compete with all this.  But here a couple of links I rather liked. The first is an old Guardian article about an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (from which this photo of the Tate Baby House was taken) and the second is the relevant V&A catalogue page. This lists 68 items in their collection of which 29 are houses. The earliest is the "Nuremberg House" dated 1673.

The Tate Baby House

You will not be surprised to read that one of the things I like about the Tate house is the external architectural detail. Bottom place goes surely to the curtains.

One of the V&A's images of the 1673 Nuremberg House

When people talk of historic dolls houses they will surely touch on the Dutch examples. The TV drama The Miniaturist merely reinforced this. The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum has three substantial and significant examples. Two are essentially display cabinets containing roomboxes, which was the fashion of the time. They are lovely, they are interesting, they are fine models, they are historically important artifacts. But they are not, in the conventional sense, miniature buildings.

The Grachtenhuis

The third however, the Grachtenhuis, is a lovely model of a very grand city house of the kind that can still be seen along the canals of Amsterdam. It dates from 1760.

I said earlier it would be foolish of me to try and compete with the wealth of available material.  A Google search on "the history of dolls houses" produced a staggering 56.4 million results.  But one book in particular seems to be the modern go-to source : Life in Miniature, A history of dolls' houses by Nicola Lisle published in 2020.  Google provide an extensive preview of the text demonstrating Nicola's easy to read style.  

There are of course many other books on the subject. Do you know of a good bibliography somewhere on the web?

One link I would like to share is the National Trust's list of "Places with the best dolls' houses" .

The best modern dolls houses are lovely, the worst are simply horrid and there is a lot of stuff in between.  I will write specifically about it - but I haven't got there yet.  There is certainly a lot to write!  

But the one thing that is clear is that there are two kinds, that it is not a single genre.  There are those intended for children to play with and there are those intended for adult collectors.  As long as that is recognised all is well.  When it gets mixed up things tend not to go as well (IMHO!).

The most serious dollshouse I have is this one. It manages to be both a serious model and to be furnished with chidren in mind. Though in other hands it could be filled with some of the exquisite miniatures that exist today.

We were lucky to pick it up at a local auction house in Hertfordshire for a crazily low price.  The builder's name is shown on a plaque in the roof.  I think he was a private individual rather than a business.  It is a super piece of work and must have taken a long time.  It stands mounted on its own trolley which includes control panel for the lights.  There are two things I particularly like about it.  One is the clever sliding floor sections giving access to the wiring.

The other is the fact that it is modelled on all four sides.  That is the charectaristic that I find disappointing in so many dolls' houses.  They are neither a facade model nor a complete model.  The heritage of the miniatures cabinet lives on.  I was struck recently by the show at Arnhem how much space was devoted to miniatures to go in houses and so little on the houses themselves.  But each to their own.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not against dolls' houses.  I have four in the house at the moment. Two of my own construction, a Plan Toys house for the grandchildren and the half-timbered giant pictured above.  I just prefer fully modelled houses.

As always, please e-mail Miniature Buildings at miniaturebuildingsite@gmail.com if you have something to add. Comments, criticisms, extra thoughts, pictures, or even complete articles for inclusion in the Miniature Buildings site are all welcome. Or if you would like to be added to my mailing list to hear when a new article is published.

David, December 2019
(last updated October 2022)