As a child, until I discovered fashion at thirteen, I devoted every penny of pocket money to my doll's house. How strange then, all these years later to have this pattern reversed – and quite by accident. In December 2021, my son Kit and I visited the Kensington Dollshouse Festival with the vague notion of finding a present for his baby sister Bunny. We were instantly gripped with miniature fever and bought the first house we saw, which happened to be a twelve room MDF McMansion. I wasn’t confident it would even fit in the playroom. It definitely wasn’t a Starter Home. But I’m an interiors nerd and he wants to be an architect, so quickly the house become a shared obsession. The baby seemed disinterested.
For a long time, we were intimidated by the size of the house and didn’t want to make a start. Instead, I busied myself with mood boards, covering a wall of my makeshift workshop with room schemes and writing extensive lists of tasks and timelines. I studied the history of doll's houses, buying every book I could find from Oxfam and Etsy. And while I took inspiration from some of the finest houses in the land, our MDF shell remained untouched in the corner.
By the time we took up our paintbrushes, I’d raised my expectations to ludicrous levels and my characteristic delusions of grandeur were now running riot, at 1:12 scale. We weren’t just making a doll's house anymore; we were making the ultimate doll's house. I had literally lost all sense of perspective.
It was quite sobering then to spend a solid fortnight of evenings getting primer on our PJs as we slapped on the basecoat - creatively unfulfilling, but we had at least begun.
Historically, doll's houses or baby houses were used as teaching aids for young women, for lessons on how to run a household. Perhaps it’s a deliberate perversion of this, that our house only serves pudding and martinis and Dom Pérignon and there’s not a whiff of domestic drudge about the place. My daughter won’t learn much from this house because it is a pure fantasy.
Because perfection is so much easier to achieve in miniature. Of course, it’s quicker and cheaper to crack on with some PVA and a junior hacksaw than to embark on a proper building project with real builders. While making this house I was doing two other life-sized renovations and let’s just say, only this one is finished (the others have years ahead of them). Sure, the work is fiddly, but the results are gratifyingly immediate. And in a doll's house you can do things that would be prohibitively expensive in reality. I’ve gone mad with Robert Adam plaster fireplaces and Fornasetti furniture. Even a lavish little kitchen is only going to cost you fifty quid. I yearn for, but could never afford de Gournay in my life, but my chinoiserie from Sutton Park is resplendent in the doll's house entrance hall and came without a million week’s lead time.
Choosing the wallpaper was a highlight for me throughout: Voysey’s “The House That Jack Built” for the nursery, a turquoise design borrowed from the drawing room at Castle Howard, an exact replica of the pink flock from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, pretty floral wrapping papers from Choosing Keeping and plain old gold card from Rymans. But my favourite discovery, stumbled upon during a midnight internet trawl, is a tiny version of Adelphi Paper Hangings' “Philadelphia Harlequin” which adorns the stairs of our London house – what are the chances?
I'm interested in how miniature interiors reflect our relationship with the spaces we occupy in real life (in my case I made deliberate connections between the two). Traditionally doll's houses have always played with this theme and on a more personal level, I want my daughter to experience the same joy in recognition and familiarity that I do when I notice those similarities. From willow pattern china to the swan planter I made from a plastic Schleich toy, (weathered with soot to replicate the stone one I bought years ago from Petersham Nurseries), to the splatterware in the kitchen, the favourite books on the shelves, my Cyanotype clouds made especially small by Will Creech, or the Peter Hone tribute plasterworks – I have filled the mini house with nods to our pretty maxi interiors at home.
We decided to take out the stairs because they dominated all the centre rooms and anyway, as Kit pointed out, “you’re not allowed to play on the stairs” – a rule as fundamental to childhood as “don’t run with scissors” surely? But elsewhere, rules seemed less important; the dining room banquet only includes cakes and booze, which speaks to my real-life inability to produce a substantial meal. Detail-orientated readers will notice that the champagne flutes are the wrong scale, I couldn’t find nice ones at 1:12 and after all, I don’t think anyone would ever complain about a pint of champagne? It’s pleasing to edit out the tedious elements of reality; my actual house might be covered in laundry and plastic toddler trash, but in the dolls’ house, only beautiful things have a place, and everything stays tidy.
I’ve included pieces recovered from my own childhood house (reupholstered with Liberty handkerchiefs and tarted up with decoupage) alongside things we’ve made from scratch, antique finds, and lots of commissioned items from expert craftspeople from all over the world. My mother did all the textiles (including embroideries small enough to fit into a brass curtain ring), and my boyfriend grouted the marble checkerboard and terracotta tiled floors while I had a little lie down in a darkened room.
A strange thing happens when you start to make small things – you begin to see the world differently. Nothing is disposable – the thrill of a new yoghurt pot for paint water, a chocolate box that could easily become a snazzy ottoman, a marbled coaster as a tabletop and gold electrical tape as a final flourish on all the edges. I have so enjoyed my fledgling experience of transformative magic of model making and my evenings are now spent perusing power tools rather than Matches Fashion.
This might be a sedate and wholesome hobby, but it is not without drama. Or swearing. I found I could only pattern match wallpaper while meditatively chanting expletives. Kit has aggressively tested every industrial strength wood glue on the market, and we narrowly avoided a trip to A&E during the making of a mahogany campaign bed. It’s too easy to accidentally throw things away in a flurry of bubble wrap, as I did with a mid-century chandelier which you’ll notice is absent from the library. Our puppy nibbled the arms off a Chippendale chair and I confess I did cry about it.
It’s important to have people you can call upon in a crisis, even if that crisis is minute and entirely of your own making. I’m indebted to Ben Pentreath for giving me permission to glue gun the mantlepieces directly to the wall rather than faff about installing chimney breasts (accompanied by a helpful slideshow of late Georgian and neo classical examples) and to Will Creech for managing to differentiate my architectural queries even though it was not always obvious if I was talking about the real house or the doll's house. There have been many moments when the line between fantasy and reality has blurred. I recently bought an exquisite antique house that arrived in such a sorry, smashed up state that there was nothing for it but to call my actual builders (Fullers) for a doll’s house SOS. Laine sent a van round and they’ve since restored it to its rightful magnificence (thank you Lewis) – sometimes, even in miniature, you do need to call in the big guns.
I’ve been completely inspired by the craftspeople within the miniature community, so much so that I’ve decided to become part of it more permanently. I felt bereft as this house neared completion, I simply wasn’t ready to down tools. My mother and I recognise that there aren’t enough children in this family to satisfy our rampant desire to keep doll-housing, so instead, we will make things for other families – taking a small number of commissions a year as The Kensington Dolls' House Company.
It’s widely recognised that in times of crisis we crave order, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is a toy made for a baby born in a pandemic – was I just trying to create an environment of total perfection and complete security to compensate for the chaos and stress of her birth? I found huge comfort in the control I had over this environment during my father’s gruelling hospice stay. Just as I found solace in these spaces after his death. Life around me was relentless and unpredictable, but in the doll's house everything was lovely. As my father’s health declined, the doll's house only got lovelier because working on it was the one thing I found profoundly calming during that time. In fact, there’s something about playing with scale that alters one’s concept of time.
Doing this feels like the opposite to on-demand, instant access culture that I embrace in the everyday. These painstaking tasks force you to slow down - it’s very unsuited to someone as pathologically impatient as me, but I think that’s been very restorative. It’s taught me to notice time more thoughtfully. I was aware, as we were engrossed in the project together during the last summer before my son turned teen, that he would not always want to collaborate with me or indulge my niche interests. The house was taller than Kit when we bought it and now he is taller than me. I do not expect him always to tolerate the childish things his little sister enjoys. And yet watching him carefully craft bedside tables, or a bathroom chair, it felt like this was a last moment of his childhood, devoted to the future of hers. As much as anything, this house is a time capsule of his love for her. And I think that is what we mean by heirloom. The delicacy required to create things this size, means there is tenderness inherent in every element. I now feel I can look into my daughter’s face and understand the instinct of so many people before me to embroider and whittle and patchwork things for her but also beyond her – every person who has made something lasting for a child knows that this child, the one you know well, will treasure it first, but how many others will it delight across the generations? Our doll's house is of course small in scale, but it has the most immense ambition – to be loved forever.
Lucy and Rebecca Clayton will be exhibiting The Blue House at Kensington Dollshouse Festival on 2nd December 2023, alongside a new range of furniture and textiles.
