[Featured] How Newfangled Dollhouses Offer Children Escape Right Now
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL // OFF DUTY // How Newfangled Dollhouses Offer Children Escape Right Now
These dollhouses are often only one room, but, with scope to 3-D print the smallest detail, they’re opening new doors for design-minded kids trapped in their family homes
By Rachel Wolfe, May 2, 2020
PETITE REAL ESTATE A fully tricked-out room from Life in a Dollhouse would run about $1,000 (pieces sold separately), lifeinadollhouseshop.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
WHILE SOME of us fill our days in isolation by rollerblading for hours or reading 900-page gothic novels, Ella Doyle, 13, has goals of a smaller order: crafting tiny furniture for intricate, stylishly designed dollhouse rooms.
“I was really not a fan of the old dollhouses with all the wooden furniture,” said Ms. Doyle, who is unmoved by damask wall coverings and stuffy Victorian ornaments. “So I decided to modernize it a little bit.” Her miniature rooms tend toward cottage-style décor: white Shaker kitchen cabinets with brass bin pulls, rolled-arm tuxedo sofas.
Contemporary Pedestal Sink, $32, jessicacloe.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
Dollhouses have come a long way since Barbie and Ken smooched stiffly in their Malibu Dreamhouse. Many aren’t houses at all. Bedrooms sprout from lunchboxes, gardens grow in teacups and interior spaces stand alone in one-room affairs known as “room boxes.” Starting with an unfinished box from a craft store, kids play interior designer, masterminding every detail of the room. They hang patterned paper on walls and harness surprisingly kid-friendly 3-D printers to create fiddly details like sink faucets.
This kind of creativity yields benefits beyond nurturing spatial skills or stoking an interest in design. “You can’t control your outside environment right now, but with miniature worlds, because you’re big, you’re necessarily the boss,” said New York child psychoanalyst Susan Scheftel. Dollhouses release kids from the real homes they’ve been stuck in. “You might create a house that has a garden as you sit in your city apartment.”
Tray of plants, $15, jessicacloe.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
Ms. Doyle works much like a pro decorator. In her Mendota Heights, Minn., basement, she takes inspiration from designers’ Instagram accounts, taping paint chips to scaled-down walls, pondering pendant lights and range handles before fashioning them with a 3-D-printer. (She started with the Flashforge Finder, about $350.) To saw marble countertops, she calls down her dad who, with her mom, builds custom homes for a living and manages her business, Life in a Dollhouse.
Graphic designer Jessica Coffee, an actual adult, also taps a 3-D printer to manufacture the minutiae her young sons specify as she revamps old-school dollhouses with them in College Place, Wash. “They insist that toilets should open and close,” she said. The boys are as happy to weigh in on slipcovers as they are to stage careful dollhouse break-ins with Black Bart and Spider-Man figurines.
DoubleNminis Miniature Board with Croissants and Jam, $26, etsy.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
Lincoln Coffee, 7, plans to create a living room with a “corner couch” and wall-to-wall carpet: “It’ll be bright, colorful and happy colors.” His ebullient aesthetic conflicts with his mom’s farmhouse-chic leanings, but they find common ground and sell the result as Jessica Cloe Miniatures. Of working fastidiously on wee décor, Ms. Coffee said, “It does relax you. If you’re feeling anxious, it provides a strange escapism.”
Children with exacting, seemingly unrealizable tastes can custom-order room boxes from artist Alexandra Osipova, in Perm, Russia. Her creations, available from her Etsy shop OhWowbySasha, sit snugly in small suitcases. One boy who wanted accommodations for his “two mouse brothers” insisted on a staircase to the second floor, a door, library books and a swing. His most pressing request? “Not to use pink,” Ms. Osipova said. So she crafted a modernist living room with orange exterior-frame sofas, green accessories, jungle-print wallpaper and a blue table and door. A ladder leads to a loft space with two beds.
PACKING NEAT OhWowBySasha Customizable Dollhouse Suitcase, from $87, etsy.com.
PHOTO: OHWOWBYSASHA
Stand-alone furnishings can be bought via Etsy and Instagram, from $5.50 for Moroccan fringed rugs to $56 for sectional sofas. But DIY works as well. The Coffees made scaled-down art with a single Calvin and Hobbes comic-strip panel, a matchstick picture frame and clear nail polish “glass.” They’ve sliced sleeves off old shirts for bedding.
KathleensMiniatures Old Rusty Milk Crate Filled with Toilet Paper, $45, etsy.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
In Dallas, interior designer Jean Liu and daughter Cricket, 8, spend hours decorating Cricket’s one-room, midcentury modern dollhouse. “The way we talk about furniture is exactly the process we have with clients,” said Ms. Liu. “Why put the dining table there? You’ll run into the cabinet.” And Ms. Liu has noticed her daughter’s increased attention to detail in the real world. “She’ll say, ‘You know, that knife and fork need to scoot in some more.”
FANCY BITS / LITTLE PIECES WITH BIG STYLE
Clockwise from top left: DoubleNminis Chocolated and Peppermint Cake, $30, etsy.com; Double French Bed, $35, lifeinadollhouseshop.com; White Modern Sofa, $46, Rustic Bird and Modern Mountains Pillows, from $4,jessicacloe.com.
PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART (CAKE)