For the Victorian tycoon, what better way to show off your wealth than to acquire a magnificent country pile and stuff it full of four-poster beds and mahogany dressers, with an army of cooks, butlers, maids and footmen? The answer is to do all of that and then do it all again in miniature.
Two years in the making, Small Stories, a new show at the V&A Museum of Childhood in London, brings together 12 magnificent dolls houses, selected from the museums 100-strong hoard, that show the changing nature and role of these Lilliputian worlds over the last 300 years. It tells a powerful story of taste, class and social mores, played out on the stage of the shrunken domestic interior. From the decorum of lavish manors to the lively chaos of an interwar council estate and the prefab dream of a 1960s high-rise, these diminutive dwellings let you have a good nosey at other peoples lives or, more accurately, the lives they always wanted to lead.
One of the earliest and most impressive models is the Tate Baby House from 1760, a Palladian mansion with rusticated stonework and steps on either side to sweep the mini-gentry up to a pedimented front door. Peel back the facade, which swings open through no fewer than seven hinged panels, and enter its world of luxury. There are armchairs embroidered in yellow silk in the drawing room, while a tiny silver candelabra with minute candles illuminates the mahogany-panelled dining room. Painted portraits hang in golden frames, elaborate mouldings and cornicing adorn every surface. Things belowstairs are equally detailed, if decidedly less lavish, with dressers and shelves groaning with tiny pots and pans.
This upstairs-downstairs separation was crucial: these miniature worlds werent just childrens playthings, or wunderkammers for the diversion of visiting ladies: they were also didactic tools, a way of illustrating just how domestic life should be played out essential, as one 18th-century historian put it, for the training of maidens. Dating from the 1600s, and popularised in the Netherlands and Germany, the baby house provided a visual aid for young and often illiterate girls learning household management. While the lady of the house embroidered ever more elaborate dresses for her idealised peg-doll self, the serving girl would learn to know her place, and how milord liked his bed to be made (with a tiny crocheted eiderdown).
For others later down the line, the dolls house became an escapist fantasy, a way to recreate the world as they wished it was. There is a grand castellated house from 1870, complete with handle-operated lift (sadly unusable behind the glass case), bought by textile designer Betty Pinney for £5 in 1962, who made its meticulous refurbishment her lifes work. Betty, her daughter Susanna recalls, was a perfectionist, and, because she could not achieve perfection in real life, she bought a dolls house. She fashioned a tiny feather-duster for the maid from the neck feathers of a pheasant, while her detailed instructions to a local craftsman acquired by the V&A specify that the butler should have a paunch and the footman calves to his legs. These complete a fantasy Downton creator Julian Fellowes would be proud of.
According to curator Alice Sage, the real dolls house boom came in the 1930s, when sets started to be mass-produced by mainstream toy manufacturers. These were were aimed squarely at children, unlike the precious display-cabinets for genteel drawing rooms. One intriguing model was a sprawling stockbroker tudor pile made by the Lines Brothers. Based on the Surrey home of one of the brothers, it boasts plumbed-in bath, flushing toilet and vacuum cleaner, and stands as something of a showcase for the Lines toy empire, purveyor of strong English toys. Its stuffed with accessories from other Lines ranges: Tri-ang, Elgin, Pit-a-Pat, Dol-Toi and Sylvanian. These names will be familiar to grandparents visiting with their grandchildren, which the V&A hopes will be a major audience for the show.
The other 1930s house could not be more of a contrast. Looking like something dreamed up at the Bauhaus, Whiteladies House is a radiant modernist villa: its smooth rendered walls are punctuated by crisp Crittall windows, its sharply cantilevered balconies lined with cruise-liner balustrades. According to its designer, Moray Thomas, it was an attempt to record in miniature the habits, homes, tastes and ideas of the young people who are unhampered by choice of possessions of old furniture, or by old conventions of drawing rooms, calling hours, formal manners or privacy. She called them a generation bred in one war and living its little time of sunshine to the full before the next one.
The houses athletic pipe-cleaner residents lounge on the roof terrace and frolic by the pool. Inside, theres a rubber-floored kitchen with an enamelled Easiwork cabinet, a mirror-walled bathroom with chrome-plated fittings, an art deco lounge all set for a mini Hercule Poirot to walk out from behind a Chinoiserie screen.
Thirty years later, a plastic dolls house was launched in association with Homes and Gardens magazine. It took inspiration from prefab construction to create stackable worlds for shiny, wipe-clean miniature residents. Buy it room by room, trumpeted the advert for Jennys Home. And then nag your parents to buy all the furniture to go with it. It was a cunning business model, in which more and more pieces could be endlessly accumulated, to form everything from courtyard developments to teetering high-rise towers. In the exhibition, rooms are piled up in a great vertical cross-section of Formica worktops and jazzy lino floors, complete with beaming tank-top wearing couples.
The final house in the show brings the story full circle. Created by artist Laurie Simmons in 2001, the Kaleidoscope House has more in common with the rarified display cabinets of the 1700s, despite its garish colours. Aimed firmly at adults and collectors, rather than children looking to have fun, the house is a clunky box of neon plexiglass, with furniture designed by Ron Arad and artwork by Cindy Sherman. It was sold at an eye-watering price in places like the Museum of Modern Art store in New York and then discontinued. Echoing the didactic baby houses of the 18th-century aristocracy, it was an appropriate template for how design victims should lead their lives and a reminder, perhaps, that dolls houses work best when theyre designed to be played with.
Small Stories is at the V&A Museum of Childhood, London E2, until 6 September. Details: vam.ac.uk
This article was amended on 16 December 2014. An earlier version said that the Kaleidoscope House was created in 1949, rather than in 2001.
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