And here's the furniture!

I could see from the auction listing that the book house I showed in my last post was something special - I could also see that most of the furniture had come from the Sydney toy shop Walther & Stevenson!

There's a pink Walther & Stevenson bedroom set:

and a blue Walther & Stevenson bedroom set:

(I'm not sure if the blue bed is from Walther & Stevenson - I'm pretty sure the blue dressing table isn't.)

Both sets have been painted twice. Walther & Stevenson sold them as natural plywood, which could be painted by the buyer, or left plain. The pieces which I bought with the Toyworks dolls house were left plain. These have apricot paint under the pink (the same pink as the house has been painted!), and pale mint green under the blue.

There's also a blue Walther & Stevenson kitchen set:

The two layers of paint on these pieces meant that the doors wouldn't open. I used a Stanley knife (box cutter) to work through the paint in the cracks, and managed to get one of the cupboard doors on the sink open, and both wardrobes.

Guess what I found in the pink wardrobe?!

Clothes! which had been painted in!!!

Here they are:

A wee dress, a top for a baby, a table cloth, a knitted jumper, and a lace skirt. Four dolls came with the house, two little girls and two babies. The dress and top fit two of the dolls perfectly:

The other little girl does fit into the jumper, but as she has no legs, she is more comfortable in the pram:

The living room furniture doesn't come from Walther & Stevenson. There are two homemade matchbox chairs, which need recovering:

And I forgot to photograph a homemade table, made from the screw-on lids of two jars with a wooden cotton reel between them (all painted pink, naturally).

I'm not sure about the fireplace - it is wooden, but professionally painted, unlike most of pieces sold by Walther & Stevenson:

The other furniture looks more recent. It is painted with European folk designs. There's another bed, with some chairs and a bench:

And a grandfather clock, table and bench:

The bed is signed underneath:

It looks like 'A. Kody'. (The taped name is presumably a former owner of the piece?)
I think I've seen other furniture on Australian ebay, with similar painted designs and also signed with this name. Does anyone know more about it, or have any?

Make your own 1970s chairs

I did buy a few other things at the fair - a book and a couple of magazines. The book was from the stand next to Anna-Maria's, and when I showed Anna-Maria the pictures, she said, "Why didn't I think of that!? Will you scan the pages?"
So here they are - with all the colour illustrations, because I love seeing how 70s style was represented here!



The book is called How to Decorate a doll's house, by Eve Barwell, published by Studio Vista in 1975 (ISBN 0289 70509 6). The 70s was when dolls houses and miniatures really took off as an adult hobby, but this book was written for children (as was the rest of the Studio Vista How To series - How to Amuse yourself on a journey, How to Disguise yourself, How to Mend your bike, How to Start using tools, etc ).

The introduction does explain about scales, particularly 1 inch to one foot and 3/4 inch to one foot, and recommends sticking to whichever scale you choose. It doesn't give measurements in the directions for making furniture, but suggests using the furniture in your own home to check the right size for your doll's house.

A lot of tips are given about how to decorate the house, based on who will be using the room, when and how often ...

The first room that visitors see is the hall, so it must be welcoming. However, it's a room where no-one spends much time, so the colours can be strong and dramatic:


An elegant, clean and bright hall, with its purple carpet and vase of red flowers giving a splash of colour ... (I have mentioned before the house which we rented in 1978, which had purple carpets and red curtains - or was it the other way around? - in rooms in which we spent a great deal of time. Clearly the decorators had not read this book.)

Postage stamps are one suggestion for pictures - an idea I have used myself (for example, here and here, although they would look better hung!!) - but personally, I prefer pictorial subjects to Willy Brandt and the Queen ...

The living room, of course, is where people spend a lot of time, and because of this it needs restful colours such as blue, brown or beige ...

Hello, Mr and Mrs Dol-toi!

This living room is decorated in beige and brown with splashes of contrasting green; orange or yellow would also have contrasted well ... A brown carpet and beige curtains would have worked just as well as a beige carpet and brown curtains, but not brown carpet and brown curtains - that would make the room seem dark and small (!).

Here are the instructions for making the living room chairs - of cardboard covered with fabric on both sides, with either pipecleaners or cardboard cut-out rectangles for the arms and legs:



For extra chairs in the living room, take some cardboard packaging (the kind which used to be used round fruit; is it still??) and make bucket chairs:


The colour scheme for the kitchen is yellow and orange, with a red Venetian blind - bright, warm colours making the room seem sunny and gay:


The cupboards and fitments are white, to make them look extra clean and bright - but the floor is patterned, as a plain colour would soon look dirty.

Here are the instructions for making this bright, white kitchen table and chairs - from polystyrene trays and cocktail sticks:



A pretty and restful colour scheme for the parents' bedroom:


and bright, primary colours for the children's bedroom / playroom:

Master and Miss Dol-toi happily playing in their bedroom

Dolly's House is now Amanda's!

Those of you who read my post on Molly Fox's dolls house collection, and the comments I received, will have seen that I was contacted by the current owner of one of the houses Mrs Fox owned, Dolly's House.


In an amazing case of serendipity, Amanda found my blog the day I posted about Molly Fox. She has very generously agreed to let me show her photos of Dolly's House here; all the descriptions are also hers.

Amanda said, "I believe Mrs Fox sold Dolly's House at auction in London in the 70s and it remained with this owner for over 30 years. The next owner had it for around 5 years and with ill health could not enjoy it and sold it on to me."


These photos show the roof which is not shown in the book. It does not come off which makes it difficult to get to the wires, and the roof space is a waste, it is so large, if built nowadays it would probably have had another room up there, or 2 or 3.

The chimney pots have spent shells from the war.


Here is Dolly's House front and back photos when I purchased it.





The little hatch is still in place in working order in the kitchen.

It had been wallpapered with modern paper which I have taken off. (I thought I may have come across some writing on the walls as I was stripping it but I didn't.) I have only completed one room downstairs left and have half finished downstairs right. It is so difficult to locate vintage wallpaper to match the original colours of the room. The book only showed black and white, so it will probably look very bright to you now. I have filled it with Dol-toi furniture that I got on the internet new in boxes, and little Grecon dolls. I thought the little cat looked similar to the one in the book, and the Christmas tree is vintage German with glass.



I make dollhouse miniatures using beads and crystal, but Dolly's House is a challenge being 16th scale. All the dollhouse items here in the UK are 12th, and I am having to make all the extras myself which takes a long time. I just finished the living room mat which took 3 months. I first used the Appletons crewel wool which gave a hard woolly finish but it keeps snapping, so I have gone back to dmc which gives a smoother finish, not as nice as Appletons. I have taken photos at a distance of normal sized photos of the family and some of my sheep (I take on orphan Herdwick sheep every year) and Matilda my miniature donkey, and cut them down to put in frames on the walls - the original little nails are still there.

It has been very difficult to source wallpaper. I ended up with J Hermes and I have used Aunt Gracie reproduced fabric for curtains. I still have the passage and the bedroom to repaper which I find very difficult to do, as the ink runs on the old Hermes wallpaper if you get the outside wet with paste, and then it is very difficult to trim even with a sharp artist knife, around the light switches etc.
I had to replace a couple of window panes as they were split and yellow, but other than that just the wallpaper as someone had replaced it - underneath was painted walls to match the doors and pelmet. The little doors and handles are all original, and the painted picture rails. The floors also have the original paint to match, I just had to disinfect the paint but it is still in very good condition. It has vinyl on the floor; I took the first layer off to reveal another layer. I have left this underneath, looks like paint to match the doors and fireplaces and pelmets. Such a lovely little house, I wanted to clean it up and make it mine, but was not sure how far to go: the brick paper on the sides looks like it has something under, and the roof paint looks too new, but the book does not show any of this so I will never know.



The original bathroom suite is still in place , with moving taps, and a moving toilet chain. The bathroom and kitchen have original paper on the walls with green and white squares which I have left alone - I will cross stitch some carpets to match. The kitchen also has a little stove that lights up.



Originally it had a large battery running the lights, and this was replaced by a rather complicated electrics board which hides behind the laundry room with a false wall, enabling me to plug it into the mains. One of the things I dread is when the light bulbs need changing in case a wire has come loose, they appear to run inside the walls, and I cannot see how or if the roof comes off to trace them when they go off. The little downstairs fireplaces lift out and have little bulbs underneath which shine through red and orange plastic to give it the red glow. I would love to hang some of my chandeliers in Dolly's House but the electrics are tricky, sometimes they can go off if a wire comes out of the circuit board at the back, so many wires, and it is just a matter of pushing on a few until they come back on.


The turntable must have been lost some years ago. It still has the little plate underneath where it must have fitted. I have Dolly's House on a table with wheels so I can move it about to fiddle with it.

The little dresser in the kitchen has drawers which are made of matchboxes reading 1922:



I have the book by Jean Latham which came with the house. I really just like to look at the pictures. I have tried to replicate as much of the original things I can find, it amazes me how much is still available in such good condition.
I have often tried to search the internet for information on Molly Fox, but did not come up with anything, I was browsing looking for Grecon dolls and I hit the side bar of options and I clicked on latest which I have never done before and your blog came up!

I have one more dollhouse which was made a few years ago with a garden. Living in the Lakes, I collect the Beatrix Potter bronze figures and thought I would make a garden to put them in. They are not to scale but it kept me busy until Dolly's House came along. I would love to know more about it who it was made for. When I bought Dolly's House I was looking for a similar one I had in my childhood but could not find one. I could not remember the make, but would recognise one if I'd seen it, but Dolly's House appealed because it opened front and back, I have it lit up every night and spend many hours furnishing it.


Thank you Amanda, for all the photos and such detailed descriptions! I love how Amanda has decorated the house so far, and made it her own while respecting the original features. It's wonderful to know that Dolly's House is in such good hands, and is being cherished and enjoyed - please keep us up to date as you decorate more rooms!

"Collecting Short Storeys": Molly Fox's Dolls House Collection

Recently I scanned and uploaded to flickr some photos of Erna Meyer dolls in roombox settings from a book called Dolls' Houses - A Personal Choice, by Jean Latham (published in 1969).


My grandmother sent me the book in 1973. We visited her over Dec 1972 / Jan 1973, and saw the Lines' dolls' houses she had bought for us for the first time. I loved them, and my sister and I were inspired by them to create a mini scene from moss, pebbles, etc, on a tree stump in the garden. We visited the studio of Oxshott potter Rosemary Wren, and, among her pottery mice and birds, I spotted a china doll's head on a shelf. Rosemary said that she had found it on the Oxshott heath, and very sweetly gave it to me. I took it home to my grandmother, who was delighted, and called her Hitty. She planned to make a body for Hitty. After that visit, during 1973, my grandmother bought me the Cupboard House, destined to be Hitty's house (I've never known what actually happened to Hitty, or more accurately Hitty's head).

Long before I saw the actual house, my grandmother sent me Jean Latham's book, as it had photos of the Cupboard House in it. My grandmother bought the house from Miss Nancy Betteworth, who had bought it from "an American collector, Mrs Fox", who owned it at the time that it was photographed for the book.

The Victorian Cupboard House, as it appeared when Mrs Fox owned it.

I only recently realised that Mrs Fox also owned the Erna Meyer dolls pictured in the same book! I uploaded them to flickr because photos that are dated help to date the dolls themselves. Then I started thinking about Mrs Fox as a collector - one of the early collectors, like my grandmother, and someone who once owned a house which is now mine, and liked the Erna Meyer dolls I love. So I thought I'd try to do a bit of a profile of her. In the course of my research, I learned that Molly Fox called her first baby Rebecca (after the heroine of A Coat for a Soldier, about a girl who stitches a coat for an American soldier in the US war of Independence). So I feel that there are many connections between Molly Fox and me!


Molly Fox was born in the USA, at Fort Benning. Her father was in the US army, and was killed in WWII; later, her brother was killed in Korea. After that, she became a Quaker, and was delighted to acquire a Quaker dolls house, which had belonged to a Quaker girl born in Reading in 1784. She married an Englishman, and lived in London, where her employment included running training courses for executives at IPC and working at Sterling Professional Publications.

"We travelled around so much when I was a child, that I never had a proper dolls' house, though I made room settings in shoe boxes and orange crates. So perhaps my dolls' house collection is a compensation for that, and also for not having had a settled stable home. It is also escapism ... I can put a parlour maid, a cook, a nanny into different rooms. If I want a pink bedroom, instantly, there's a pink bedroom - and indulgence one can't afford in real life." (The Times, 1972)

Mrs Bernard Fox, as Jean Latham called her in the parlance of the time, began collecting in about 1965, and she was one of three collectors chosen by Jean Latham for her chapter entitled "Dolls' House Collecting Today", in Dolls' Houses - A Personal Choice. The others were Miss Faith Eaton (later author of The Ultimate Dolls House Book) and Mrs McQuade.

"The three collections described above are chosen almost at random from amongst an enormous number. They are not in the class of those who are lucky enough to be able to spend freely on anything that catches their roving fancy, foraging in the most expensive antique shops or the greatest salerooms. My three representative collectors have in common a flair for picking out gold from dross, unquenchable enthusiasm, a sense of history, good taste and unbounded energy in pursuit of their fascinating hobby."

At the time this book was written, Mrs Fox had five houses and furniture for another six rooms, which she kept on shelves in a cupboard.

One of Molly Fox's modern furniture room settings. Mrs Fox made the patchwork quilt, petit point needlework, "oriental" rug, and the doll's dolly made from toothpicks, herself.

One of the houses Mrs Fox owned at the time the book was written was, of course, the Cupboard House. The photographs above show it as furnished by her. The original pieces - the dining and drawing room fireplaces, the drawing room rug, the bedroom curtain, the tiny views of Hampton Court by the drawing room door - remain in the house, along with some that I suspect may have been added by Molly Fox or another owner - the kitchen and landing curtains, and the tapestry rug on the landing. Among the furnishings which Molly Fox had in the house, but which she (or the next owner) did not sell with it, are brass goblets in the kitchen made out of WWI bullets, and a kitchen dresser made by disabled veterans of that war. The kitchen range, ca 1860, looks very like the one my grandmother placed in the house, but I can't see it clearly enough to be sure. Molly Fox made the black and white pictures from illustrations "after Phiz" taken from Charles Dickens' novels.

Another, sadly not illustrated or described, was "Alexandra House, Finchley Road", from about 1914, "and peopled only by women as the men are all fighting in the war!"

Molly Fox's modern house, called "Dolly's House", dated to the 1920s. It had a brass nameplate, letter box and keyhole, and was built as a square, with rooms opening at both the front and the back. The house was mounted on a swivel platform, so that the kitchen, bathroom and laundry at the back could be accessed, as well as the four rooms at the front of the house.

Dolly's House, ca 1920s

The house, as you can see in this photo, has two storeys and a hallway, with stairs, running from front to back of the house. It was wired for lighting - even the fireplaces glowed red. The dining room had a hatch through to the kitchen (the hatch is just visible in the photo, on the left side of the bottom right room).
Molly Fox furnished this house with Barton and Dol-toi furniture and Grecon dolls. She added some American-made accessories, and framed postage stamps depicting Old Master paintings as pictures.

Dolls' Houses - A Personal Choice also describes Mrs Fox's late Georgian house, ca 1825, which had four rooms but no stairs. All the chimney pieces were built in, and, as Jean Latham puts it, "suitable fireplaces added", with a grate and stove in the kitchen. I'm not sure, but this phrasing suggests to me that the fireplaces may not have been original - not uncommon in houses of this age.
Molly Fox had traced the history of the house "as far back as the third generation of its owner", who was a Miss G. Baddeley, and so she called it Miss Baddeley's House.
This may be the dolls house mentioned in the 1972 article (see below), which says that one of Molly Fox's first purchases was a box of dolls' furniture in the Portobello Road, for £50. The man who sold it to her said "I'll give you the Georgian house that goes with it." Mrs Fox was sceptical, but the V&A verified from samples of the wallpaper that the house was pre-Victorian.

Possibly the kitchen of Miss Baddeley's House? The caption reads, "The kitchen of a late Georgian house. The pink and grey wallpaper is modern. The maid who is cleaning the old Britannia metalware is in her original clothes. Notice the chamber candlestick with the snuffer on a chain."

Molly Fox had repapered the house with modern wallpaper (I do hope she left the original paper underneath, as this is vital for future owners wanting to verify the date or origins of a house!), and furnished it with a towel rail complete with an old linen towel, a toilet mirror and chest of drawers with an ivory hand miror, and a sideboard containing unusual ivory tablespoons and knives and a rare cradle (I think this may mean ladle?).

Some of the pieces from Miss Baddeley's House. The furniture was described as "Duncan Phyfe" in Jean Latham's captions; this term had been used by Vivien Greene until her research in the then GDR identified the manufacturer as Gebrüder Schneegas. The doll on the left wears a dress made by Molly Fox from antique silks, ribbon and velvet; the gentleman doll wears his original velvet suit with scarlet silk lining and revers, and a shirt with minute tucks sewn with tiny stitches.

I've also found an article in The Times of 1st April, 1972, 'Collecting short storeys', by Bevis Hillier. From this, I learnt that Mrs Molly Fox founded the Dolls' House Society in 1970 as an offshoot of the Doll Club of Great Britain.

"We are the Jesuits of the doll world," Mrs Fox says. "To qualify for membership, you have to own at least a nineteenth-century dolls' house, and you have to have a skill - woodworking , repairs, needlework or so on. Among our members, for example, Mrs Beryl West has made an exquisite silver Queen Anne teapot. She also has a lathe for turning miniature furniture, and she makes tapestry carpets. Mrs Winifred Warren is a needlework teacher, and makes pillow lace with bobbins. Miss Faith Eaton is a specialist in doll repair, especially wax faces. She has done repairs for Buckingham Palace and many major museums."

For their AGM, the members of the Dolls' House Society held 3 day weekends. In 1971, they stayed at Shepton Mallet and visited the American Museum at Bath and Titania's Palace (then at Wookey Hole). In 1972, they planned to stay at Fittleworth in Sussex, and view Lady Samuelson's collection of dolls' houses, and the Uppark dolls' house.

At the time the newspaper article was written, Mrs Fox owned what she described as a small-scale model of the first commercially made house, with bay windows and a balcony (ca 1885-1890), bought for £25. This sounds like it could have been a boxback-type house, which were sold by companies such as Silber & Fleming (established ca 1860), C. E. Turnbull (established 1872), and G. & J. Lines (ca 1890s). Much of what we now know about these firms was of course only just being discovered in the early 1970s.

Also in her collection was a Seaside Villa, ca 1890-1910, purchased for £50 - the photo below shows some of the dolls in the Seaside Villa preparing for a night at the opera. The dolls and furniture usually cost more than the house - the dolls in the Seaside Villa were priced at £100.


The prize of her collection was a 1775 house (perhaps an architect's model) with a distinguished neo-classical facade, which she bought at a shop called The Lacquer Chest, Church Street, Kensington.

A shop she recommended for collectors was The Dolls' House, at 4 Broadley St, NW8 (ph 723-1418). It stocked a wide range of houses, from cardboard houses at £1 to a ca 1830-1850 wooden house at £160. In the mid-range at the time of the article were four pretty French houses with balconies at about £38 each. The Dolls' House specialised in reproduction hand-made furniture - it was, said Mrs Fox, a good idea for the beginner to furnish their houses with reproduction pieces, and gradually replace the new with old pieces as they were able to acquire them.

Molly Fox herself did just that, buying artisan-made reproduction furniture for her Georgian houses. In an instance of serendipity, one of a set of 6 issues of International Dolls' House News, which I bought last year from a collector who was disposing of her duplicate issues, has an article by Molly Fox! The article (My Missing Treasures, IDHN 6:1 Spring 1977) is about miniature furniture which had been stolen, and which had been destined for her Georgian dolls' house (which had been featured in the IDHN of Summer 1975, if anyone has that issue).

The globe pictured here had been bought at Willoughby's 18th Century, in California. The library furniture were bought from a London dealer. "The collection had belonged to Anna Massey, the actress, so I was able to put a possible date on the furniture. I think it was made in the Forties and Fifties and purchased in New York at the oft-mentioned shop on East 53rd St. One of the drawers of the sideboard had a trade sticker of E. Kautter."

Mrs Fox also lost some pine kitchen furniture made by Warren Dick, a hooded mahogany cradle from the Chestnut Hill Studios, and a small bureau bookcase which had a twin in the display cases at Windsor Castle, and probably dated from the 1920s.

Molly Fox's husband Bernard made the longcase clock and "Queen Anne" chair in this room setting; Molly Fox herself made the carpet and screen in petitpoint needlework. Most of the furniture is modern American, but the butler's tray and folding stand are English. Fimo was not available when Mrs Fox started collecting; she and fellow members of the Dolls' House Society "cooked" and painted plaster of paris food!

She had begun to replace the furniture she lost, buying from artisans working in the 1970s: a four-poster bed from J. Huthwaite of Coventry, an oak trestle table by Don Slater, a basket spit by Alf Atkins, and Regency chairs and a pedestal table described as "made in Columbia and bought at FAO Schwartz in New York". This last sounds like Sonia Messer (Lynnfield/Block House), which is still much sought after by collectors. I'm not familiar with the other names myself, but perhaps some of their furniture is also appearing in online and live auctions?

Perhaps some other UK-based collectors will know whether Molly Fox still has her dolls' house collection. Of the eight houses mentioned in the book and newspaper article, I know that she sold at least one (the Cupboard House). I wonder where the others are now - Miss Baddeley's House, Dolly's House, and the others? If they have new owners, do those owners know that their house was at one time owned by Molly Fox? Unlike real houses, dolls' houses unfortunately don't come with title deeds, and a few changes of ownership can be enough for any history that earlier owners have discovered to be forgotten.