A log burns in the hearth in the artfully lit drawing room. The armchairs look plush and inviting. Glasses and a bottle of wine stand ready as a grandfather clock keeps time. It is all straight out of a glossy magazine and yet every carefully crafted item in the room could fit into the palm of one hand.
“I love Victorian (19th century) houses and always wanted to live in one but it never happened,” laughed doll house enthusiast Michele Simmons, admiring the cozy miniature scene by historical specialists Mulvany & Rogers.
The 57-year-old corporate recruiter revived her childhood passion for doll houses during the pandemic and has since “flipped” about 10, buying them, doing them up and selling them on.
Photo: AFP
She and her daughter thought nothing of flying all night from Boston in the US to hunt for tiny curtains and a child’s crib at the leading Kensington Dollshouse festival in London.
“I love it! You don’t think about anything else when you are doing this,” she said, admitting she often had to be dragged out of her work shed to feed her children as she became so absorbed.
EXQUISITE MINIATURES
The annual festival has been gathering some of the world’s finest miniature craftspeople since 1985, celebrating a hobby that has seen rising interest recently and a mushrooming of online activity. It showcases tiny versions of anything needed to furnish a house, from chandeliers and paintings to mahogany dining tables and kitchen items, all with steep price tags.
Doll houses may be traditionally associated with children, but this high-end miniature collecting is very much an adult hobby.
“This is craftspeople working on just exquisite things,” said self-confessed “tiny-obsessed” Rachel Collings, who bought toys from renowned miniaturists Laurence & Angela St. Leger.
Every single one of her purchases, which cost at least US$53, fits easily into a small plastic container and will be added to her collection of equally small items.
“I’ve got half a cut lemon. Just imagine the size of that. A lemon squeezer and a pastry brush and a hand whisk that actually works,” said the 47-year-old editor.
“It’s an inner child thing. These things are just so beautiful.”
Doll houses originated from Europe in the 1500s when they were used to display the miniature possessions of the wealthy.
Just as at the London festival, these so-called “baby houses” were strictly for adults, not children.
Retired midwife Susan Evans, 67, on her annual pilgrimage from Colwyn Bay in north Wales, does not just have one doll house.
“I have a whole village,” she said. “It’s got 18 Victorian shops, a school, a manor house, a pub and now a church,” she said.
Initially the hobby was just a stress-buster to help her unwind, but she has now raised thousands of pounds hosting groups to visit the display in her home.
“It’s my passion. It’s escapism and it’s about using your imagination, which I think is very good for your mental health,” she said.
“IN CONTROL”
Kensington Dollshouse organizer Charlotte Stokoe said there was currently huge interest in doll houses and miniatures compared to before the pandemic.
“When the world itself is going a bit crazy with so much stress in everyone’s lives, it’s quite relaxing. You are in control,” she said, adding that many people had delighted in pulling out old doll’s houses during the COVID lockdowns.
And at a time of rising costs, she said, people had “discovered they can do interior design that maybe they can’t do with their own homes — in small scale it’s so much more doable.”
Medical anthropologist Dalia Iskander of University College London (UCL) has spent three years researching the subject for her forthcoming book Miniature Antidotes.
“For many people it’s a way of exploring their own experiences and memories and imagination and incorporating that into these miniature worlds,” she said.
A whole range of medical issues such as depression or anxiety could all be explored through miniatures in a “beneficial” way, she added.
Miniatures enthusiast Collings said the hobby had become such a source of happiness that her 12-year-old daughter also got involved. She urged anyone to give it a try.
“When everything is difficult, there are these tiny things,” she said.
“Sometimes I just go and sit and look at them and it just makes me happy.”
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
RSS