A Bodo Hennig in Australia?

I was quite excited when I saw this dolls house on Australian ebay earlier this year:

I recognised the design from diepuppenstubensammlerin's Update: Bodo Hennig Dolls Houses 1955-1981. In Germany, it was called the MIDI-Puppenhaus Allgäu. I had also seen it in the 1983 catalogue of a UK importer, Stephen Burghard. There, it was called Tina's House:

So perhaps it had been imported into Australia, too?

I could see, though, that the wallpapers in the Australian house were different from the ones used in Haus Allgäu / Tina's house, which I recognise from my Bodo Hennig Bodensee.

(I think the stairs got a bit bumped during the trip.)

The dolls house was in Canberra, and Anna-Maria (The Shopping Sherpa) very kindly collected it and held it for me, until I went to Canberra and picked it up from her last weekend.

I mentioned in an email to Anna-Maria how great it was to find a Bodo Hennig dolls house in Australia, and not have the expense of shipping it from overseas.

The rugs came with the house, and seem to have been made for it. Major trip hazards for dolls, though!

After she had picked it up, Anna-Maria replied,

 Except it’s not a Bodo Hennig L Sorry to break that to you, but unless BH manufactured under the name ‘Woodtoys Pty Ltd’ I think you’ve just bought an Australian licensed product. Which actually might be more interesting… J

The name Woodtoys is clearly printed on the back of the house:

I agree with Anna-Maria that it's even more interesting - I had not heard of Woodtoys Pty Ltd before, and I am always delighted to learn about Australian makers of dolls houses!

I still don't know much about Woodtoys - Anna-Maria found company information which showed that they were registered in 1977, and deregistered at the end of 2009. Apart from the wallpapers, the design of this dolls house appears identical to the Bodo Hennig Haus Allgäu / Tina's house, and the dimensions are the same as those given in the Burghard catalogue. So it would seem that it was made under license. I wonder if other Bodo Hennig models were also made here, or whether Woodtoys distributed Bodo Hennig dolls house furniture (smaller and lighter to import than dolls houses)?

If you know anything about Woodtoys, I'd love to hear from you! I hope one day, too, that I'll be able to look through issues of the Australian toy trade journal, and maybe I'll find some information about Woodtoys in that. I was able to visit the National Library of Australia while I was in Canberra, and skimmed through issues of the toy trade magazine from 1964-1969. I did discover some Australian-made dolls houses that were new to me, as well as some imported ones - I'll show some of my discoveries in another post. I didn't have time to look through later issues from the 1970s and 80s, so didn't find any mentions of Woodtoys.

The Rosetta Stone Award

Recently I was presented with the Rosetta Stone Award by My Realitty's dolls. I am very honoured - especially as the award was just created by CM and her dolls, so I am the very first recipient (and it's quite exciting to know someone who created a blog award!).


The Rosetta Stone Award, I am informed, is a serious award for scholarship on the history of dollhouses. The dolls said,

This is the first "Rosetta Stone Award". It is given to a dollhouse blogger who has contributed greatly to the information of dollhouse history.

As we all know dollhouses were originally the hobby of rich women or tools to teach girl children to keep house.

Today women all over the world are interested in them. Note the number of bloggers and that Dollhouse blogs are a world unto themselves. Though these houses started as toys and may have led a perilous life, once they are in the harbor of the collector they have a story to tell. This award is to acknowledge the sleuthing it takes to discover that story.

Furthermore this award is issued to only one person, must be kept for 6 months then passed on to another worthy recipient. There are many worthy of this award... ... and this year we are bestowing it on... Rebecca of Rebecca's Collections for her serious and valuable work on English dollhouses.

Thank you very much, CM and your dolls! I appreciate it very much - especially as I completely agree that there are many worthy of the award, and I know that the research I do follows on from the work that others have done.

As some of you know, I love family history research. Researching my own family can be particularly moving, but I also love the thrill of the hunt, when one clue leads on to another - or when you get a bit stuck, and try to think of other ways to approach the problem. I started researching dolls house firms when an article on dolls houses made or sold by the firm C. E. Turnbull was published in the first issue of the Dolls Houses Past and Present online magazine. The author stated that not much was known about the firm, not even an address.

Well, that was a challenge I couldn't resist - and quite an easy one to solve, as this London-based firm existed from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a time for which the UK censuses are available to search online.

So that got me started - and now Florine of My Vintage Dollhouses and other treasures and I are researching the history of dolls houses made by Keystone of Boston, Massachusetts!

I thought about how to celebrate this award - and I decided to make a scene rather like the room where I do my research. I've borrowed the downstairs living room of the Bodensee and filled it with books (borrowed from many other houses too), on bookcases squeezed in everywhere they can fit, with dolls houses on shelves, trolleys, the floor ... and Linda Kimber is modelling me doing research (or possibly browsing ebay ;-) ) on the computer!

I put this scene together, and photographed it - and then thought, but where are the boxes? Because my study has lots of boxes in it - boxes of dolls house furniture I've just received, boxes of stored dolls house furniture, the original boxes for dolls houses and sets of furniture .... So I added some boxes!

It looks like my sister's cats have come to visit, as mine are both black. But they do like to sit with me when I'm working on the computer :-)

Thanks again, CM and your dolls!

Tim at home (MA 15+, Contains scenes of nudity)

Tim has invited Johnno home to his bedsitter for a game of cards.


What's the design on his pack of cards?


Hmm, pin-ups! It seems that Tim is rather fond of images of women in bikinis (or less), as he has a few around the room, including his collection of lighters on the cabinet:


He also has a few men's magazines:


And what channels can he get on the TV?



Definitely adult only!

Tim's collection was inspired by a comment in a book about antique and vintage dolls houses and their furnishings. I cannot now remember which book, or who the author was, but she wondered whether all dolls house inhabitants would have been of such good character if, as well as The Times, the Bible and Punch magazine, they had had miniature Playboy magazines.

I think that erotica and pornography has probably always been made in miniature, as well as full size, but it was of course not intended for children.

All of my dolls houses were made for children to play with (and, in fact, have been played with by children!), and mostly I furnish and decorate them with pieces also made for children's play. I do use vintage buttons, jewellery, charms and other small items that were not originally made for dolls houses - but so have children done.

These miniatures, however - the mini lighters, the playing cards, the TV - were presumably made for adult men (or at least teenage boys). So they probably didn't often find their way into children's dolls houses. I found the mini cards on Australian ebay - the seller remembered "trying to get those tiny decks of nudie cards out of the claw machine at the funfair".

The TV is made in Hong Kong, and looks exactly the same as those which are souvenirs of Jersey, for example, or show fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, as the one in the Bodensee house does:



(Tim's bedsitter is furnished with some Europa pieces, a ca 1960s Bodo Hennig bed/couch (and probably the wooden cabinet too), and a vinyl-covered sofa and armchair from the US (I don't know whether they're homemade or not). The room is 1960s German, and came with the room I have furnished with Dora Kuhn furniture. I made the miniature men's magazines myself, as I don't actually know of any vintage ones! As I don't have any 1960s pinup magazines (or any other vintage, come to that), they are composites of covers and centrefolds found on ebay, with entirely other images as back covers!)

Dora Kuhn folk-art style German furniture (and more Erna Meyer dolls)

Here is some sweet folk-art style furniture, which I believe was made by Dora Kuhn, a southern Bavarian firm, possibly in the 1960s. I have furnished a German 1960s roombox with them.


The roombox has a floor, two side walls and a back wall; this one can be put together and taken apart by means of little plastic tabs (as on the end of the left wall here). (The blue you can see above and below the roombox are the shelves of the trolley it's standing on.)

The furniture is not marked, except with numbers stamped on the bottom of some pieces. However, I have seen identical dolls' house furniture on ebay (German, and often also the US), described as made by Dora Kuhn.


The accessories and tiny dolls house are all made in Germany too, though I do not know the maker - they were ebay finds. The dolls are by Erna Meyer, who has produced dolls dressed in traditional German costume as well as up-to-the-minute fashion, historical fashions, as fairytale figures, etc.
Two of the dolls seem to be dressed in regional costumes; I've moved them to the front in this photo:


Perhaps Oese or another reader might recognise them?

Bodo Hennig Bodensee 1981

It was love at first sight for me with this house:


I grew up in a country town in Australia in a house built in the mid 1960s by a German builder, Klaus Lenffer. It was a split-level house (we had four stairs!), built of concrete blocks painted white, with dark wooden beams and panelling. The exterior of Bodensee reminds me so much of that house.

The only problem was that the Bodensee house was listed on UK ebay. Luckily it was listed by a wonderful seller, tink4tatt, who was prepared to ship internationally - and was not daunted by the problems involved in doing so. First the postage quote she was given was wrong, then she was told the box was too big for the mail at all. Finally, she found a shipping company (literally - she lives in a port town), which would ship the box by sea to Australia.
It wasn't cheap, of course, and it wasn't straightforward at this end either. The box arrived not in Darwin (also a port city), but in Perth, 4300km away. I had to pay a customs inspection fee, and fill in forms stating what it was made of, and that I didn't intend to sell it. Then it was sent by road (!) on the final leg to Darwin.

It was definitely worth all the cost and effort, as it's a wonderful house. It's big - it has eight rooms, including three bedrooms and two living areas. It came with curtains, presumably made by a previous owner, and some furniture. I have bought more Bodo Hennig furniture, mainly on German ebay. The house seems to me very 70s in style, though it apparently doesn't appear in Bodo Hennig catalogues until 1981.

On the left are the kitchen, downstairs, and a bedroom, upstairs. The kitchen has very groovy wallpaper in an apple design:


and the kitchen units have typical 70s orange & yellow flowery tiles:


All the furniture, and most of the accessories, here are Bodo Hennig. The blender is marked Japan, and the braided rug came from America.

Above the kitchen is a bedroom which I have furnished as the teenage daughter's room:


She has a beautiful set of furniture, with matching dressing table, wardrobe, single bed, and two bedside tables. All the furniture is Bodo Hennig, including the amazing rug.

However, the younger children (Erna Meyer dolls) are playing in it at the moment, as their own bedroom, on the other side of the house, is too small to play in:


So they use their older sister's bedroom. They have been colouring in at the table, but now they are dressing up:



The family has some visitors today, and the men are outside on the (imaginary) patio, drinking beer and keeping an eye on the barbeque:


Don't you love the beard and moustache on these Erna Meyer men?


The women are having coffee in the upstairs living area:


As you can see, I have a number of very groovy Bodo Hennig lamps. The house did come with a transformer, but I haven't yet tried setting it up and connecting the lamps.

You can just see the top of the stair rail at the back right of this room - they go up behind the wall with the fireplace in the downstairs living area:

The teenaged daughter doesn't have any friends of her own age over today, and she's sitting reading in the downstairs living area with one of the cats for company.

From the upstairs living room, we can access the bathroom (behind the yellow wall) and the master bedroom (behind the white wall).




Wow! As I said, the exterior of the Bodensee reminds me of the house I grew up, but all the interior walls of our house were white. Just imagine having a bath here, in the orange and brown bath, surrounded by orange flowered tiles!


The master bedroom is a bit quieter, being decorated in brown and yellow:



Below the bathroom and master bedroom, off the downstairs living area, are the kids' bedroom, which we've already seen, and the dining room. Really, the family needs an extending table, as they can't possibly fit all their guests around this one: