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The history of dolls houses
The fascinating hobby of making houses and all of their contents in miniature form is not a recent one. It has been in existence for centuries in one form or another. The earliest recorded replica of a fully furnished house was owned by Albert V, Duke of Bavaria, in the mid-sixteenth century. It was a copy of his own residence and became known as his ‘baby house’. Following this, many other wealthy people started to get miniature pieces made by expert craftsmen using all sorts of quality materials. These were not made for use as children’s playthings but were solely a display of taste, wealth and social standing.
This fashion continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and gradually the joy of miniatures began to be shared by the children of these wealthy households. Initially they were not so much toys as aids to education in life and household management. Nevertheless by the mid nineteenth century the doll house was at last a plaything, though only for the children of the wealthy, and no well-equipped nursery was complete without one.
The arrival of the Victorian age saw the beginning of mass production. From then on the doll house was truly a toy and it was for this market that the miniature pieces were produced in quantity. The manufacture of thse was mostly made in Germany and thenexported all over the world.
However there were two notable adult exceptions to this new trend. The first was Queen Mary, the wife of King George V of England, who had a strong interest in dolls houses. In the early 1920′s one of the foremost architects of the day, Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned to build a doll house for the Queen’s personal pleasure. A model house was designed in the precise scale of one inch to one foot and again, as in the preceding centuries, fine craftsmen of the day were involved in the production of all different types of miniature items.
At about the same time in America, Mrs James W. Thorne, a socialite from Chicago, was collecting miniatures from all over the world. She cam up with the idea of displaying these items in sets of boxes which were furnished in a range of different styles and periods. By 1940 Mrs Thorne had put together over forty individual room settings showing both European and American interior designs and decoration. All of these rooms were completed in exact one inch to the foot scale.
Since then the manufacture of toy miniatures for children’s dolls houses has continued and, although antique doll houses have long been collected by the enthusiasts it was not until the 1970′s that adults again started to collect contemporary pieces and display them in houses or room boxes.
Today the hobby of miniature collecting is enjoying a huge growth in popularity and there are a growing number of smaller more specialized shops, fairs and dolls houses magazines to catar for the growing demand. Miniature enthusiasts like to recreate past eras or present events in either whole houses or specific scenes. Some enjoy making the models themselves, while others collect craftsman-made pieces or commission them to be made to their particular requirements. The aim in all this is to achieve accurate detail to capture the right mood, character and style and to add personal touches to the work, raising the hobby to an art form of creative expression.
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