Collecting Dollhouses

A dollhouse is a toy home, made in miniature. The collection and crafting of dollhouses has become a fascination for a large growing number of adults. Today's doll's house traces its history back about four hundred years to the "baby houses" of Europe. The baby houses were cabinet display cases made up of rooms. These cabinets were built with architectural details and filled with miniature household items and were solely the playthings of adults. They were trophy collections owned by the few matrons livingin the cities of Holland, England and Germany who were wealthy enough to affoid them. They were fully furnished and many were worth the price of a modest full-size house's construction.

Furniture of a dollhouse

Little miniature homes furnished with domestic accesorries, people and animals have been made for thousands of years. The earliest know examples were found in the Egyptian Tombs of the Old Kingdom created nearly five thousand years ago. The wooden models of servants, furnishings, boats, livestock and pets placed in the Pyramids were probably made for religious purposes. The earliest known European dollhouses are from the Sixteenth Century. The baby or cabinet houses showed idealize interiors complete with detailed furnishings and accessories mostly hand made.

The early European dollhouses were each unique and constructed on a custom basis by individual craftsmen. During the Industrial Revolution, factories began mass producing toys that included the dollhouses and miniatures suitable for furnishing them.

Some of the German companies noted for their dollhouses included:

In the United States by the end of the Nineteenth Century American dollhouses were being made by the Bliss Manufacturing Company, however, Germany was the producer of the most prized dollhouses and dollhouse miniatures up until the Great War. Very notable German miniature companies included:

German dollhouses and miniature accessories were avidly collected in Central Europe and regularly exported to Britain and North America. With Germany's involvement in World War I, production and export was seriously impeded. New manufacturers in countries arose.

The Toy Furniture Shop of Providence, Rhode Island (The Tynie Toy Company) made authentic replicas of American antique houses and furniture in a uniform scale beginning in about 1917. Other American companies of the early Twentieth Century were Roger Williams Toys, Tootsietoy, Schoenhut, and the Wisconsin Toy Company. Dollhouse dolls and miniatures were also produced in Japan. These were mostly copies of the original German designs.

After World War II dollhouses became mass produced in factories on a much larger scale and with less detailed craftsmanship than was ever before. By the 1950's the typical dollhouse sold commerically was painted sheet metal filled with plastic furniture. The cost for these dollhouses was low enough to allow the great majority of girls from the developed western countries that were not struggling with rebuilding after World War II to own a dollhouse.

Several magnificient antique dollhouses are on exhibit in museums around the world. These dollhouses were not specifically constructed to capture the era of time of creation, however, the activities of daily living are shown in such great detail in some of them that the viewer gains some insight into domestic life of the times.

Dutch: The Doll's House of Petronella Oortman c. 1686-1705: The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam estimates that P.Oortman spent twenty to thirty thousand guilders on her "model house," the price of a real house along one of Amsterdam's canals at that time. This doll's house shows the linen room (laundry room), kitchen, and bedrooms in great detail, which illustrates the activities of the household of that era.

English: The Tate House (1760) is on exhibit in the Museum of Childhood in London.

Famous Dollhouses

Queen Mary's Dolls' House

Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle

Thorne Rooms

Moomin House

This web site is created for the dollhouse collector and/or the would-be dollhouse collector as an information resource for the hobby of collecting dollhouses.

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