Yellow roses and a koala in a cardboard dolls house

This cardboard dolls house caught my eye on Australian ebay:

Golden yellow is one of my favourite colours - and I love yellow roses! They have been "my" roses since, at our childhood home, I had a yellow rose outside my bedroom window, my sister had a pink rose outside hers - and Mum had deep red roses in the front yard!

The bowl of yellow roses is in the children's bedroom, upstairs right.

The parents' bedroom, upstairs left, has a dressing table with toiletries, an abstract rug - and lots of books! I like this house!

The clocks all say the same time, which is good - but they seem to be printed back to front! So it's back-to-front 3 o'clock.

 

This house is nearly complete - it's one of those where the bottom of the box it comes in forms the base of the house. Thankfully, the base is here - but the lid of the box is missing, so there is no information about the maker or the model, nor whether there would have been furniture included. There is one piece that suggests there might have been furnishings - a red and white striped cardboard rectangle, which I have placed in front of the kitchen sink, as a floor mat.


In the kitchen (downstairs right), the cupboards don't look very Australian to me - I thought perhaps it might be American?

But then in the living room (downstairs left):

there's a picture of a koala on the wall:

That doesn't mean it's Australian, of course - I could have a picture of elephants or tigers on my wall, without having to be in Africa or Asia ....

Here is the outside of the house - quite plain, a red brick base, yellow walls with brown timbering, and a tiled roof:

The doors and windows are attached only by one side, so they can open (some have actually torn off, but thankfully all are present).

The end with the kitchen and the children's bedroom has four opening windows (and the number 12, which a former owner has added!). The other end, with the living room and parents' bedroom, has a red brick chimney, with arched window openings on either side of the chimney, in the living room:

One additional feature I like - in both downstairs rooms, light fittings are printed on the ceilings!

This house came with plastic Blue-Box furniture, much of it broken. The red living room wing chairs are a good fit, so I may find others to use in it - and look through my plastic furniture for other suitable pieces.

Does anyone recognise this cardboard dolls house? I'm guessing it was made in the 1960s, largely because of the television, but would love to know a more exact date - and of course, the maker!

(I do still have photos of the displays at the Sydney Dolls House fair to show. I have been without a functioning phone/internet line since late last week, after reporting a crackly line - now it's working again (touch wood), and I was keen to show you this lovely house! The display photos will come soon :-)  )

Another Princess

Listed on Australian ebay recently was this copy of The Australian Woman's Mirror, with the tantalising headline "Special in this issue, Princess Betty's Doll's House - A Gift Toy".

The seller was quick to point out that, 80 years after publication, it was unlikely that this gift would still be available ... but I am always looking out for descriptions and especially illustrations of dolls houses in old periodicals, and I was not disappointed with this one.

A full-page article describes and shows the reproduction of Princess Elizabeth's play house, which readers of the Australian Woman's Mirror could obtain by sending in four differently numbered coupons (so even if the publisher still had the dolls house, I think I would have some trouble finding the other three issues of the magazine, in order to collect my coupons!!)

This dolls house is much smaller than the famous Triang Princess dolls house - this one is only 10 inches wide, 7 1/2 inches high (to the eaves) and the rooms are 3 1/2 inches deep. It seems to be made of cardboard - it is described as "made entirely in one piece, and machine-cut and scored. It can quickly be folded to shape according to simple directions."

The article begins,

"Thousands of girls and boys know that the people of Wales gave a marvellous Doll's House as a birthday present to little Princess Elizabeth - a wonderful Doll's House big enough for the Princess to play inside - with real furniture and all!
"Of course only a Princess could have a Doll's Houses as big as that, but - we thought - how wonderful it would be if every Australian girl and boy could have a little one similar to the Princess's, with a tiny dining-room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, complete with furniture that could be moved around as they liked!
"That gave us an idea. We obtained all the plans and details of the famous original Doll's House. Artists and architects helped us with the model, and now the result of months of intricate work and modelling is available to every child who has longed to own a wonderful doll's house."

This sounds very much as if this version of the Princess dolls house is unique to Australia, indeed unique to the Australian Woman's Mirror - though I would not be at all surprised to find that a parent company of the Mirror in the UK was actually responsible for this model.

The stairs do not require many folds, as they are printed to simulate the treads and risers.

The article kindly showed all 8 pieces of furniture included with the house. Here is the bedroom furniture, and the bath:

You can see in the photo, above, showing the open back of the dolls house, that some furnishings were printed on the walls - the bathroom basin and mirror, for example, and the dining room fireplace. The dining room seems only to have been supplied with a table and a sideboard:

For the kitchen, there was a gas stove and a long cupboard (called a dresser, though not my idea of a kitchen dresser):

As suggested in the article, the child who owned this dolls house could add toys they already possessed, and perhaps a tiny doll as well.

Even if not every Australian girl and boy obtained this little house in 1934, I do hope that some have survived, and that one might find its way to my collection!

John Sands and houses of card

Most Australians will know the name John Sands, our longest-established publisher of greeting cards. They used also to publish many other things - books, maps, pamphlets, and especially board games - and last year I discovered that they had produced a cardboard dolls house in 1968.

First, I saw this ad in the Australian toy trade journal issue for June 1968:

The dolls house was just visible in a photo of the Sands display at the TAGMA (Toy and Games Manufacturers of Australia) exhibition in 1969:

Then this brochure popped up on ebay, 'Welcome to Gameland with John Sands':

On the back of the leaflet is the dolls house:

so now I had a colour image of it:

Then, late last year, I was delighted to spot the actual dolls house on Gumtree, and the seller was able to post it!

According to the lid, it originally came with furniture for four rooms - the lounge room, dining room, bedroom and kitchen. None of this has survived with this dolls house, unfortunately.

The base of the box is up-ended, and forms the garden and ground floor of the house, into which the walls and fences are slotted:

The house itself is also missing a few parts - the porch, the lamp over the door, the dormer window and chimney, and the little balconies under the side windows. Luckily the awnings are still there - they make the house look nice and cheerful!

Apart from the missing bits, and a smudge of paint on one side (which I haven't yet tried to remove), the house is in good condition.

Does anyone know what the furniture looked like? Hopefully one day I'll find a more complete set, or, if I know what it looks like, I might possibly find the furniture separately. I'd love to see the house furnished!

Amazingly, not long after finding this John Sands dolls house, I spotted another one on ebay! The second one is much older - I think probably from the 1930s.

This is called the Play Time Doll House. Some collectors, particularly those in America, will probably recognise it - I think that this was republished by John Sands from an original published (probably) by Warren Paper Products Co of Indiana. Built-Rite / Warren Paper Products was one of several companies making cardboard dolls houses in the 1930s, and they produced a range of models. I have one which I bought some years ago, from Wendy Stephen in the UK. It has exactly the same wording on it - "A Large, Rugged, Easy to Build House" - though I have just noticed that in fact it has no publisher's name on it at all!

The bottom of this John Sands box again forms the base of the house. Being much older, the sides of this box have collapsed a bit, so I placed the base on a couple of books to get the required height.

You will, of course, have noticed the very large Rogers sign on the roof! The Rogers logo also appears on all four sides of the box. It is printed on the box, but on the roof it's a label which has been pasted on:

In tiny letters, on the bottom left, is the name of the publisher: John Sands Ltd., Sydney. The house was obviously intended to promote Rogers paints, stating on the roof "Always use Rogers - the Mark of Quality - Paints and Varnishes - "If it's Rogers - it's Right!"

The floor of the house (base of the box) also has labels stuck on, proclaiming "For renewing Cars, Cycles, Woodwork or Furniture, use Rogers - the Mark of Quality - Ace Full Gloss Super Finish, Made in attractive deep shades & in soft pastel tints for inside use".
The interior of this house, though, is plain white!

I have found ads for Rogers paints with the same logo, dating from the late 1930s, like this one from the Northern Star newspaper (of Lismore, NSW), on 8 July 1939:

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article98592464

The house itself is a lovely old English style, popular in Australia at the time. There's an arched porch door under a steeply sloping roof:

All the windows have shutters and window boxes filled with gaily coloured flowers:

The windows have cardboard panes which can be punched out, but most are, amazingly, still in place. The tabs on the sides of each piece of wall or roof are more fragile - some are missing altogether, and others are splitting after many attempts to fit them through the triangular slots.

It's interesting that, though this house shows signs of having been much played with (the missing tabs, and the sticky tape holding the box and the sides of the house together), more of the window panes haven't been removed. I would think that it would make the interior more attractive and more realistic, to be able to see out ...

I wonder how it was furnished? This box doesn't say that the house came with furniture, but perhaps John Sands also made the cardboard furniture produced by Built-Rite / Warren Paper Products in the US in the 1930s.

While checking the digitised Australian newspapers for Rogers paints, and any sign of their promotional dolls houses, I came across this ad, published in regional newspapers in Victoria in July and August 1930:

The Electricity Commission of Victoria was offering at their showrooms, "free for the kiddies "Yallourn Cottage", which is a handsomely colored cardboard "doll's house" with doors and windows that open."
I wonder if John Sands also published this? I would love to know what Yallourn Cottage looked like - it was clearly named for Yallourn, the town built between the 1920s and 1950s to house employees of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, who operated the nearby Yallourn Power Station. When the coal mine next to the town expanded in the 1980s, the town was closed and removed!

Do you know of other Australian-made cardboard dolls houses and furnishings? Now that I have two houses, I'll certainly be keeping my eye out for more!

Spot-On Antimacassars

In the last post, I showed the TV chair and bookcase from this Triang Spot-On boxed set. I bought this set because I love the cardboard room setting provided, especially the way that the chairs appear to have antimacassars!

The three wing chairs are held in place under semi-circular cut-outs from the cardboard of the back wall. The walls are pink, but the semi-circular pieces over the chairs are white with a pink and blue floral design. They are clearly intended to represent the embroidered doilies placed on the backs of chairs to protect them from hair oil! Isn't that a wonderful detail?

The other features printed on the walls are pretty groovy too - the mirror looks art deco with those streaks of glass going diagonally across it, and the lampshade looks like it's about to fall off!

There's a door into another room ....

though the walls on this side of the room are otherwise bare.

I showed the front of the box in the last post - here it is again:

Triang very usefully give the scale of these furnishings, 1/16", on the box.

Although the front of the box has a sticker saying "Lounge Ref. No. B", and it's definitely a lounge room in the box, the ends are printed with "Bedsitter Ref. No. L". I wonder if they produced more boxes for bedsitters than they needed?

I love the silhouettes of Spot-On pieces shown here.

Woops! Someone forgot to shut the back of the delivery van!

("Where did you get that nice furniture, Mrs Jones?" "Oh, it just fell off the back of a truck!!")