A Queenslander - or two ...

While I was in Bathurst two weeks ago, I was able to take photos of some new dolls houses. 
This one is my first made in the style commonly known as a Queenslander - built on stumps, with a verandah on at least one side. The stumps mean that air can flow under the house, and the house itself catches more breezes, being raised. It's also useful in areas that flood.

This one is quite simple - a single storey, with square verandah posts and solid brackets, and large-scale lattice on three sides of the underfloor space. It was made for a little girl who would have been born around 1920 - she is now 95. Unfortunately I don't know her name, but I bought the dolls house from her niece, who lives in an inner north-western suburb of Brisbane. The niece had also played with it as a child, and so did her (the niece's) daughter, so it had remained in one family since it was made. 

The inside is also simple - just three rooms, with solid partitions between them, no doors. It's big - 134 cm long, 63 cm deep, and 88 cm high. (This dolls house is currently stored in a room with many others, and it's so big that I couldn't get far enough back to get the whole length in a shot, so the photos of the front and back of the house are the seller's.)

The front door doesn't open - it currently has an open upper part, but this may have had glass in it originally. As you can see from this photo of the middle room, some repainting has occurred. I haven't really thought about it much yet, but I do rather like the colour on the side wall here - and I wonder if the floor was originally a reddish colour.

This is the room on the right (as you look at it from the back), and as you can see, there is coloured, patterned glass in one window. Perhaps they all originally had glass - I'm glad it remains in one window. The detail of the glass can be seen better from the front of the house - 

The room on the left (from the back) - both end rooms have two windows. 

Here's a view of the ceiling - just simple planks:

I think the lattice and roof have been painted green fairly recently - I'd say the lattice was white at one point, at least on the outside:

Inside, it is still bare wood:

There's quite a large roof space, but it's not accessible.

I look forward to cleaning this house during another trip to Bathurst, and perhaps investigating if there are other paint colours underneath the current ones. I will also think about what larger scale furniture I have from the 1920s and 30s - perhaps the pokerwork set I bought at the Sydney fair might find a home here, and I have some wicker furniture which will probably go on the verandah.

Another new dolls house, which also has some features of the Queenslander style. Lots of houses in Darwin are built like this too, with the main part of the house set high off the ground, and stairs leading up to the back and front doors. In fact, I bought this house in western Sydney - the seller told me that it came to him from a mate of his, whose son had made it while an inmate in Long Bay Jail (a prison at Malabar, 12 km south-east of the city of Sydney). I don't know where the mate or his son were from, or what inspired the son to make a house in this style. I also don't know when it was made, only that the son was in jail for 20 years.

This dolls house is also large, though not quite as big as the one above - but again I'm using some of the seller's photos, as it was difficult for me to get the whole house in shot. I bought it at Easter, and drove with it to Bathurst. I had hired a sedan - larger than my usual car, but almost not big enough! However, we managed to squeeze the base into the back seats, the upper floor into the boot, and the roof came off its hinges and rested on the base! 

The seller, who is a cabinet maker, had repaired and painted the house. It was not originally red and white - he told me that there were symbols of fruit on the outside walls, from the old cases it had been made from. (They might well help to date the house, but I don't know whether it would be worth trying to strip the paint to find them.) 
The balcony on these two sides of the house was originally there - some of the balustrades were missing, and the seller had replaced them. He added the perspex in the double windows - there was just an open space there.

The doors were originally solid - the seller had cut the half-moon shapes into them. However, the posts and braces supporting this end of the balcony are original, he told me.



At the other end of the house is another door. I think this just opened to a small balcony - the seller certainly added the stairs, so there are now stairs to the front and back doors.

The roof is made to lift up on hinges along the back side of the house. As I haven't screwed the hinges back on yet, I was able to take a photo straight down into the upper floor:

The carpet is new, added by the seller. I don't like it, and I plan to remove it (though I'm sure it will leave a sticky mess - I'll probably have to cover it with other carpet or flooring of some kind). The lino in the two small rooms is new too, but I will keep it, I think, for the bathroom and laundry - or bathroom and toilet? not sure.
The wallpapers are unfortunately sticky-back plastic (Contact), but again I'll remove them - and probably also the remains of earlier wallpaper (from the 1960s or 70s?) and take it back to the original pale green paint, I think:

Although this floor lifts off the ground floor, I didn't take it off to take photos. From the outside, the ground floor is accessed by a small door under the stairs to the main balcony (which you can see above), and two large double doors on one side of the house:

as well as another small door on the opposite side of the house:

 With these double doors, could one of these rooms have originally been intended as a garage? The carpet is new here too - and while the upper part of the base is original, a deeper base has been added, with castors on it - which makes moving the house much easier!
Here we can see the unfinished bottom of the hardboard which forms the floor of the upper level:

The walls of this lower level are also made of hardboard - the rough inner surface is still visible under the paint.

In many ways, I would love to have had this house without the new paint, carpet and wallpapers. However, the seller did a much better job than I ever could in repairing the stairs and balcony - and the house does look really good with stairs at the back too. So I'm happy to have acquired it as it now is - although I don't really look forward to removing the carpet and contact! I'm not sure whether I will leave all the doors and window frames painted red - I'll have to think about it. And furnishing it will be a long way down the track, as this house joins a long list of others in Bathurst needing work! I'd still be interested to hear your thoughts on what period I could furnish it in, though.

Number 4, the biggest and oldest

Here's the last of my 4 new dolls houses in Bathurst. I bought this one on ebay from Melbourne, and happened to be in Bathurst when I had it freighted - fortuitous, as it's big and quite heavy! So it cost enough to bring it up to Bathurst, let alone all the way to Darwin ...

This house is over 3 feet wide - about 37" (or 92.5 cm), and 37" high as well, to the top of the roof ridge (40" (1 m) including the chimney, which isn't visible here as it needs to be fixed back into the house).

Style-wise, the house could be anywhere from about the 1880s-1930s. I don't know much about it, but, if the wallpapers are original, I think it probably dates from around the 1920s.
(There is a removalists' label inside one of the fronts - probably from a former owner, who perhaps might have a bit of information about it? I might try contacting them ..... )

The house has two opening fronts - well, they should open on hinges, but the hinges are broken, so the fronts are removable at the moment. They are held closed by little wooden latches that you can just see (at the bottom of the roof line, on either side of the non-opening central section), and there used to be a lock, as well.

There are two bay windows, one on either side of the front door ...

And just inside the front door is the staircase:

You can see that the exterior paint is quite worn and crazed, and some strips are missing from the door frame, window frames and roof ridges. I quite like the aged appearance, and the missing bits reveal earlier decoration. The existing brick exterior is incised into the wood, and painted (and then the paint seems to have come off in places where it's been washed or sanded). The exterior must originally have been papered with red brick paper - a tiny bit appears at the bottom of a window frame, where a strip of wood is missing:

The roof also has tiles incised into the wood, and is then painted grey - but where the roof ridge strips are missing, there is grey tile paper visible:

Inside the house, there are four main rooms:

and a little annex in the top left room! This was described in the auction listing as a pantry, but I'm pretty sure it was intended as a bathroom!

It's the only house of this age that I have which has a bathroom - very exciting! (Still needs cleaning!)

I mentioned the wallpapers - let's have a closer look at them. In both downstairs rooms is a rather faded and slightly stained paper with an art deco design:

I'm going to keep this paper - I've bought some artists' chalk pastels to disguise the water stains a bit. The colours were obviously brighter when the paper was new - you can see remnants of colours in some places - grey, yellow, pale blue, salmon and white. Perhaps the original colouring would be preserved behind the stairs, or behind the wood in the corner of this room - but I don't think I'll take the house apart to find out!

The lower left room, which I think of as the kitchen, had other wallpapers applied over the art deco one. I think I'll probably leave the remains of the bright blue paper, with black and red shapes on it ... but cover the water stain here with pastels ...

While whatever flooring was in the lower right room has long gone, there are remains of floor papers in the kitchen:

There's a streaky bluey-green paper, and on the right, a streaky brown paper. Both are covered with a reddish substance, which I think is probably from the base of lino which was stuck onto the papers at some point, and then later removed. So I think the original flooring was bluey-green in the centre, with brown strips at the sides (and back and front too, perhaps?) I'm not sure yet what I'll do with this floor - probably find some old floor paper and place it over this.

Upstairs, the wallpapers are less exciting, but both rooms have two layers of flooring. This is the upper right room:

Here's a better view of the original wallpaper, as well as a scrap of one of the papers applied over it:

The original paper was cream-coloured, I think - it's browned in places - and embossed in a small pattern of irregular round shapes. One of the later papers was a ca 1970s embossed design of green on white, which can be seen in the corner in the photo above. On the back wall, there are remains of this paper too - just the brown back part of the paper, which I am removing - you can see the shapes of the embossing in this brown backing. You can also see a scrap of another paper, with a pink on white design.

The floor in here is very exciting. What you see first is blue stripey lino with a pink painted surround - but under the blue lino is a pink floor paper with a design of tiny dots:

Isn't it wonderful?! I'd like to lift the lino off altogether - I just hope I can do it without tearing this lovely paper.

The upper left room has some rather nice lino:

and a plain terracotta wallpaper:

It also has the same kind of very delicate floor paper under the lino, this time in brown. The lino isn't as loose here, but you can just see the paper:

I tried out a couple of pieces of furniture, just to see what they would look like. Obviously, there's a lot more cleaning to do, let along possibly removing the lino, and finding new floor papers for the kitchen and lower right room.

This bath would look good with the lino - not such a good match with the brown floor paper, if I remove the lino ....

I thought the triangular decoration of this sideboard made from Handicrafts design 5363 (available from the early 1920s-1934) would go well with the art deco wallpaper ...

I am also thinking about dolls to live here. The rooms have very high ceilings - about 13 inches (32.5 cm), and this lower right room is 12" (30 cm) wide and 15" (about 37.5 cm) deep. I could either have 1/12th scale dolls with very spacious rooms, or perhaps slightly larger dolls - I'll see what I have, and what comes along .... lots of excitement ahead!