Wallpaper, old and new-old

After finishing the inside of the DH/D, I turned my attention to my Battlement House. This house is the abode of an antiquarian's daughter (and possibly the antiquarian, when he is home from his explorations).

To start with, I placed the furniture I've been collecting for it, in the room which will be the antiquarian's study, along with the carpet, pieces of printed out wallpaper, and some antiquities from the antiquarian's collections.


(The wallpaper is a 1918 design by C. F. A. Voysey, which I've reproduced from an illustration in an old Past Times pocket diary.)

Then, I decided that I would remove the electric light switches. They're very large, and date from about the 1920s, so if I ever use the lights in this house, I'll get it rewired.


Underneath the switch by the fireplace is a fragment of earlier wallpaper. It looks like green and grey diamonds on a buff background.


So, now - do I try to remove the paint from the walls and see if there are more fragments? I'm not sure how I would get the paint off - I suspect scraping would just bring up the top, printed layer of the paper with the paint, and leave, if anything, just fibres from the buff coloured paper itself. I think this paper is the same date as the lights - it matches the colour of the lampshade in this room - so it's probably not the original wallpaper. It's still old, and I'll try to protect it somehow so that if someone removes the wallpaper I put in, this fragile bit of paper doesn't come off with it.

The Battlement House has arrived - now, where do I put it?

Today my newest dolls house arrived. It is huge - 3 feet wide and 3 1/2 feet tall! Each room is 17 1/2 inches wide, 17 1/2 inches tall, and 15 1/2 inches deep. So really this is 1/6th scale. I thought about where to put it before I bid on it, but now I am not sure.
It's an interesting mixture of styles, from the battlement on the roof, to the very ornate fireplaces in the two rooms on the right. This is the upper room, perhaps a living room or bedroom?


This is the lower right room, where the fireplace decoration includes sphynxes, mermaids and cupids, along with weeping women. Possibly either a dining room or living room?


I have never seen anything like these fireplaces, particularly this one - if anyone recognises them, or knows more about them, I would love to know! They are really the reason I bought this house.

The other two rooms, on the left, are very plain - the upper room has only a lampshade:


while the kitchen has a shelf running along the back wall:


I am not sure when this house was made. I suspect that the electric lights and wiring were added at some point - it is early, but the wiring seems clumsy. The style of the house and fireplaces suggests to me the very early 20th century, or possibly late 19th century (ca 1890-1915?). I did some research in digitised Australian newspapers, and found a story, printed in the Melbourne paper The Argus in 1924, about a man who in 1914:

"made a 2-story doll's house, 5ft. 4in. in height, lit by electricity, with "all modern conveniences," and set in a miniature landscape garden."

10 years later the original owner presented this dolls house to the children's ward of a hospital, hence the story in the paper.

So it is possible that my crenellated dolls house was made around this time, complete with electricity. I will try to discover when the light switches were made, which may also provide some clues.

It seems that large scale dolls houses were quite common at this period. Here is a photograph of another large dolls house, where the inhabitants can be seen sitting on the verandah:


They are a baby doll, a kewpie, and two teddy bears. Houses such as these clearly provided a home for the dolls (and bears) which little girls played with. I think my Leadlight House is probably also in this scale; like the house in this photograph, the woodwork is fairly rough, but it has very decorative features to delight a little girl.

I don't yet know who will live in my house, or how I will furnish and decorate it. I don't have a lot of furniture in this scale, so I'll see what looks good, and think about who might live in a house with battlements, sphynxes, mermaids and cupids!