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 I do use vintage buttons, jewellery, charms and other small items that were not originally made for dolls houses - but so have children done.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!)

To Brio or not to Brio?

When I saw these pieces on Australian ebay, they looked familiar. The Shopping Sherpa, for example, has the shelving units in her Brio house. But did Brio make them in these colours and these finishes? I wasn't sure.

I bid on the auction, which also included these pieces:


and won it.
Not long afterwards, a boxed set of kitchen furniture was listed on Australian ebay too:


The seller gave the brand names shown on the box - EUROPA on the left, and RUSCO OF AUSTRALIA on the right.


Well, I'd heard of Rusco as an Australian company making dolls, but was not aware that they produced any dolls house miniatures. I also thought that by the 1970s, manufacture of plastic dolls house furniture had pretty much ceased in Australia. So I was intrigued - and could see in the pictures on the box the other pieces I'd just bought, as well as an identical sink unit.

So I bid on this set too, and when it arrived, discovered, in small writing on one side, that it was MADE IN HONG KONG.

Also, that this is

Modern Scandinavian Design ■ Doll House Furniture
and
Neues Design aus Scandinavien ■ Puppenhaus-Möbel

Presumably this was marketed in Germany as well as in English-speaking countries.

It seems that there was quite an industry in Hong Kong making plastic dolls house furniture based on the designs of other companies. I have Blue Box furniture, made in Hong Kong, which is almost identical to Jenny's Home (Triang Spot-On) pieces, and other pieces of Blue Box furniture which look very like the 60s designs made in the former East Germany. This box does not give the name of the Hong Kong company which made the furniture, and all the furniture is unmarked. So it wasn't Blue Box, and in Australia seems to have been marketed under the Rusco name - if it was sold in Germany, it surely would have been under another company, though?

As well as the photos on the sides of the box showing each set of furniture, there is a photo on the back of a Europa dolls house filled with Europa furniture. Again, the house looks very like Brio dolls houses, even having the brand name on a central pediment:


The box doesn't show any of the chairs or sofas in the Arne Jacobsen Egg and Swan designs, however, so there was clearly a limit to what they would or could copy!

Has anyone produced a book on Hong Kong dolls house furniture, I wonder? Carola's dolls house website does have a page on Europa furniture, so perhaps she knows a little more about it.