BEST AND WORST DOLLS' HOUSES
architectural defects which might mar a childhood
WRITING of that triumph of the miniatur- isation of doniestic architecture, the Queen's Dolls' House at Windsor Castle, A. C. Benson noted how 'The word Doll is one of the magical symbols over-weighted with meaning, which take you immediately back into what we mean by "the old days" and evoke the sudden attendrissement which not even the hardest-hearted can wholly escape. This feeling may be dismis- sed as sentiment . . .' but that sentiment can have a powerful significance, and a dolls' house can become a poignant symbol of innocence, of the ideal, of the unattain- able in real, full-sized life. Sir Edwin Lutyens proposed giving a superb Dolls' House to Queen Mary in 1920 and the idea appealed to a society exhausted and numbed by war. The present strong revival of interest in the dolls' house — by adults — may indicate a widespread desire for security, for uncomplicated domestic bliss at a time of frightening insecurity and social instability as well as reflecting the current revival of traditional English domestic architecture.
Just as the Queen's Dolls' House was intended to represent the characteristic domestic arrangements of its time (albeit on rather a grand scale), so modem dolls' houses faithfully express the spirit of our age, I am afraid. Oh dear: the first house I came across in my research at Hamley's is the 'Claremont Chalet' made by Caroline's Home of Tonbridge. With its long, irregu- larly pitched gable, shutters and piers, it represents to perfection the sort of vulgar, ranch-style suburban house which can be found at Weybridge or Virginia Water. It costs £26.50p and for an extra £17.99p the unfortunate child saddled with this architectural horror can add just the sort of pretentious extension which ought never to get planning permission: a 'Georgian' sun- lounge, complete with bottle-glass in the windows.
This is not the cheapest dolls' house. Blue Box of New York offer for £11.99 a plastic, flat-roofed tenement block of three stories with a manually operated lift. It looks like working-class housing which might have been erected in the Modern style in 1938 in, say, Glasgow. Europeans do things a little better. Bodo Henning offer three models of Puppenhaus: the `Allgau', the 'Tina' and the `Evi'. This last is all roof and gable: a fine expression of good German Heimatstil, perhaps also of 1938. At £24.99p the Swedes offer Lundby, a pitched roof and shuttered house. It is reassuring to find that the Swedes cannot face their usual stripped pine modernity in a dolls' house (imagine a 'Conran' model, filled with miniature Angle-poise lamps and Habitat furniture; it would be a very deprived child who was given that). Unfor- tunately, the young Swede can also buy a flat-roofed garage and laundry room exten- sion to ruin the effect.
All these models are rather suburban. At the upper end of the dolls' property market £240 will secure a Large Sussex Cottage made by Messrs Sussex Cottage of Sussex. Unfortunately this large wooden model looks nothing like a Sussex cottage, for, with its thatched roof, it looks like the sort of twee design Clough Williams-Ellis might have submitted for St Loe Strachey's Spectator Cheap Cottage Competition for Letchworth. Its merit is that it is solidly made of wood and that it has a proper facade which hinges open. This is very important: we have a 1940s dolls' house at home in the style of Oliver Hill (white, green pantiled roof) with a sliding façade, which our daughter finds very irritating.
As the enchanting collection in the Bethnal Green Museum shows, dolls' houses can be in almost all styles. There is one in the classic, white box Modem Movement style of the 1930s, but I have yet to see a Miesian 'Glass House' model, or a 'High Tech' dolls' house. Dolls' houses, like real houses, must be truly domestic in style so it is no surprise to find that most are Georgian. The trouble is that too many look like a Neo-Georgian 'Town House' in, say, Gerrards Cross or like a Barratt Home in Dulwich (the 'Wellington' would be a good trade name for a dolls' house) rather than reproducing a decent, gentlemanly Georgian rectory. This, of course, is precisely the trouble with mod- ern British Classicism: architects don't know their Orders.
Again in Hamley's the large wooden three-bay 'Georgian House' offered by Studio 10 Honeychurch at £171.99p is a fine thing with a proper Doric porch, but it is let down by the coarseness of its window details. Of course such dolls' houses, like model railways, are really made for adults, but one would not want one's child to grow up familiar with bad architecture. The same firm's cheaper 'Town House' is let down by the feebleness of its pediment. Messrs Domat of W4 offer ready-painted Georgian houses with shop fronts (the appeal of the plain wood houses is that you can paint and wallpaper them yourself), which are let down by feeble perspex windows with, ugh!, painted glazing bars and on the Casson-style mansard the win- dows actually slope backwards.
More ambitious architecture is offered by the Dolls' House Emporium run by Tudor Models Ltd at Park Hall, Denby, Derbyshire. The standard range includes the 'Classical' but this is, alas, the sort of classicism applied to Stalinist housing blocks in outer Leningrad in the 1950s. Thin pilaster strips run up three stories to a diminutive pediment while the windows do not have proper Georgian panes or Palla- dian proportions. This costs £56. The `Regent' at £110 is too much of an insult to the subtle charm of the Regency to deserve analysis and, sadly, even the 'St George's Hill' (why the name of that village of Whiteley Homes near Weybridge?) at £220 is flawed. This, at 1:12 scale and 48 inches wide is potentially a fine thing: three stories with a balustraded parapet and five bays with a recessed centre, so reminiscent of a provincial English Baroque country house which Smith of Warwick might have designed — but he would never have made ground and first floor windows the same size, nor used a feeble attenuated Doric order for both giant pilasters and the attic storey. I must say, however, that the furniture offered in Tudor Models' cata- logue is very good, and I am pleased to see that there is no `Stereo-Anlage', complete with speakers and knobs, such as Bodo Henning offer with typical Germanic thor- oughness (although Queen Mary's Dolls' House does contain a gramophone, I must admit). But the exquisite dolls's house at Nostell Priory — now an exhibition in Washington — which was possibly made by Chippendale in about 1740 and designed by the architect James Paine shows what can be done.
The best new dolls' houses, as. architecture, I have seen I came across by chance in Ulverston, Lancashire. In the Furness Galleries were beautifully made wooden models of proper Georgian houses and down in the basement I found Mr Anthony F. Irving erecting a superb and vast wooden model of Scarlet O'Hara's plantation house as seen in Gone with the Wind. It was complete, right down to sliding wooden sashes. Mr Irving was making it from plans sent out from Amer- ica: it was not his fault that it looked more 1880 than ante-bellum Classical. Mr Irving's strength is that he likes to work from real buildings and accurate drawings. Other dolls' house manufacturers should take note. Lutyens long ago showed that it is possible to create an exquisite miniature domestic fantasy and get the architecture right.
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