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About MeI was introduced to the world of dolls houses from a very young age when my dad made me a wooden dolls house that was too big to get through the garage door into the house! Although it broke his heart to saw it in half and rebuild it, I ended up with a two storey Tudor dolls house with removable front and roof containing furniture that my mum had made out of upholstered cardboard boxes and carefully camouflaged plastic bottles. Over the years I redecorated and redesigned the interior more times than I can remember, making pots, pans and curtains, pulling up carpets and pulling down interior walls. This has stood me in good stead for future projects.
Around this time I had recently graduated from university and had very limited funds to be ploughed into a dolls house. This house therefore evolved gradually room by room, starting in the kitchen and working around a gentleman’s study, dark sombre Victorian hallway, Art Nouveau influenced bedroom and parlour. After around five years the novelty of the late Victorian era was wearing off and I was curious to try something new. When I was twenty-six I bought my first full sized house, a late Victorian terrace in East London. Visits to the Metropolitan Archives in Farringdon and Walthamstow enabled me to look through the 1901 Census and trace the family who lived there. Between 1901 and 1906 Joseph Lambert (of undisclosed occupation) and his sister Mary A. Lambert, a dressmaker, lived in Once the house was made I was in the fortunate position of being made redundant and this gave me three months to paint, tile, and decorate. The front of this house is covered in one thousand of Richard Stacey’s London stock bricks each applied individually with a pair of tweezers! The front garden is entirely my own work, using wire covered in tiny grains of sand and painted to look like lavender and hollyhocks fashioned from tiny paper scrolls. Later I fitted a window seat in the front parlour and crammed each room with various works of art (under Joseph’s influence) cut from postcards from the National Portrait gallery. After that I moved onto smaller things. A spontaneous moment at the Kensington dolls house fair has resulted in me being the proud owner of a 1/24th scale conservatory, complete apart from a parrot and it seems that Tudor is the next era to be tackled in the same scale.
Finding good quality source information about dolls houses in their own context, on the internet has been extremely difficult. This has prompted me to build a site of my own. I have written about the kind of things that I wanted to know when I got my very first house and also about things that subsequently became important as I became a more experienced miniaturist. My objective for this site is to make it the most comprehensive and current single source of dolls house material available on the internet. |
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Shortly before my 21st birthday, a friend of my mums inherited a fully furnished and inhabited dolls house from a close friend of hers. Unbeknown to me she had recently bought herself a similar house from Sid Cooke, As she did not want to own two such similar houses, I became the proud owner of a flat pack four roomed Georgian dolls house overnight and have never looked back since.
my house. I decided that they would be the perfect occupants of my next dolls house and I duly went on one of Peter Waldren’s Dolls House Holidays to make my own house in 1/12th scale. This was the first time that I tried my hand at woodwork since I’d been at secondary school but the end result sits proudly in my living room and is my second completed house. I used the same Edwardian Heritage paints from Dulux that I used in my own rooms and wherever possible I bought dolls house furniture that was similar to my own. I decided that Joseph was an infirm, educated gentleman who spent his time painting and reading, whilst Mary generated the household income by running her dressmaking business from her front bedroom. 
Along the way I was introduced to a friend of a friend called Sarah who had a “street” of six or seven dolls houses arranged in her living room. When she ran out of room, she turned to 1/24th scale and now has a similar “street” of smaller houses occupying her conservatory. Sarah is lucky enough to have time and space on her hands and makes much of the furniture in her dolls houses. She has been a constant source of inspiration, knowledge and creative ideas. Her dolls houses feature in many of the photographs on this website.