This dolls' house museum on the internet grew from a simple wish: to make a curated collection accessible to all lovers and friends of dolls' houses and doll rooms — and to interested newcomers too — that would otherwise remain behind closed doors. What you see here has been gathered over many years.
The holdings
At its core stand around fifty different dolls' houses of all epochs, each with its complete furnishings. To these belong about twenty old doll rooms and miniature kitchens, together with a companion collection of some one hundred and fifty old dolls. The emphasis lies clearly on the dolls' houses, and by preference on houses from 1850 to 1940; alongside them a few newer houses in the nostalgic style carry the tradition into the present.
Rescue and restoration
A central idea of the collection is rescue. Over the years the work has been directed at acquiring many surviving — and often damaged — dolls' houses and restoring them properly. Lost interiors have been rebuilt in detail, with the aim of doing so as authentically as possible and using, wherever it can be managed, only original furniture, single pieces and doll's-house dolls of the respective period.
In practice this often proves extremely difficult, for old or at least suitable wallpapers, furniture and small fittings are hard to obtain today, or extremely expensive. Yet with curiosity, idealism and many a long night's work it has again and again been possible to breathe new life into the old houses.
A library and a purpose
The museum also keeps a library of well over two hundred specialist and reference books from around the world about old dolls' houses, documenting building forms, furniture styles and the histories of individual makers. A particular concern is to show children the old dolls' houses and to explain them — offering a vivid, living window into the domestic world of their great-grandmothers. Those who wish to visit a great public collection of this kind will find one of the finest at the Victoria and Albert Museum. To understand how these houses came to be, read the history of dolls' houses.