Dollhouse is a miniature house filled with tiny furniture and other home furnishings. Girls and boys like to play with dollhouses, and many adults enjoy building and furnishing them as a hobby. Old dollhouses also provide valuable information about life in the past.
The first dollhouses were made in the mid-1500’s for wealthy adults. Many stood 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall or taller. Many of these early houses were furnished like the homes of their owners, with fine furniture, pictures, china, and silver. Many Dutch merchants had cabinet dollhouses, which were wooden cabinets with tiny rooms instead of drawers or shelves. Famous cabinet dollhouses include the Utrecht Dollhouse, built about 1680, and a dollhouse built in the late 1600’s for a Dutch woman named Petronella Brandt. In the early 1700’s in Arnstadt, Germany, the Duchess Dorothea made a group of small furnished rooms she called Mon Plaisir.
Similar dollhouses became popular in Great Britain during the 1700’s. Unlike the Dutch dollhouses, the British ones looked like real homes from the outside. They were called baby houses because of their size, and because dolls in these houses were called babies. The famous designer Thomas Chippendale possibly made furniture for one of these houses.
Children’s dollhouses appeared in the late 1700’s. They were smaller than adult dollhouses. Some were only 9 inches (23 centimeters) high. Fancy dollhouses continued to interest adults, however. The Stettheimer Dollhouse in the Museum of the City of New York was made in the 1920’s by a society woman named Carrie Stettheimer. Well-known artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, and William Zorach, created tiny works especially for this house. Another famous dollhouse was made in the 1930’s for the silent-film star Colleen Moore. It is now in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The famous Queen’s Dolls’ House in Windsor Castle in England was made in the 1920’s for Queen Mary.
A homemade dollhouse can be made from a wooden or cardboard box. Little rectangles of sandpaper can be used as bricks, and gift-wrap can serve as wallpaper. Furniture for the dollhouse can be made from many everyday materials. For example, a small handbag mirror might become a wall mirror for a dollhouse.
