Getting your ducks lined up in a row

Pan recently did a delightful post about a Barrett's Novelty box she acquired, with a porthole mirror. She also has other items in this set, and wondered if anyone had other items. Her earlier post about her Barretts Pop-Up Electric Toaster inspired me to photograph my boxed sets of Barretts Novelties when I visited my mother in July, so here they finally are!

Mine came via America, where they were sold at Shackman's in New York:


Inside are the original Barretts boxes:


The boxes are illustrated and labelled on all sides:




Don't you love the logo? A beefeater standing at arms inside the B! The company which made them is A. Barrett & Sons - here they use the rather grand name of The Barretts of Sonderburg Street (their premises until 1970).

A. Barrett had been making metal dolls house accessories since 1920, in partnership with F.G. Taylor, as Taylor & Barrett. After World War II, both men set up independent companies with their sons, and A. Barrett & Sons produced dolls house pieces from the early 1950s until 1983, with metal pieces gradually replaced by plastic. If you want to know more about Barrett and/or Taylor, Marion Osborne's book Bartons "Model Homes" has a history of the firms, and lists and photos of the items they produced. The Novelty Box series was sold from about 1959 to 1970, but a lot of the items were available previously (in metal) and later (in plastic).

The contents of these three boxes are in my late Victorian Cupboard House, so it's puzzle find the Barretts:

(There's another Barretts' Novelty set in this photo - can you pick it?
Hint: see the list on the box below! I don't have the box for this one.)

(No, this toast was not made in the pop-up toaster!
Someone must have eaten those slices, and made some more on the range.)

Recently I bought another boxed Barretts' Novelty Set. This box doesn't have a label or a picture showing what it is:



Can you tell?



Yes, it's the ducks!

Here they are in the living room of the Italian Villa style house.


Marion Osborne says that Nos 9 and 10 were added to the list on the box when Barretts re-ordered the boxes for the novelty series, and had to take into consideration future lines. The scales apparently never got past the prototype stage; she believes the Sunbeam Mixer was part of the Kitchen Accessories set, but didn't know what else was. Does anyone have a kitchen set?

I've just won another lot of boxed Barretts Novelty sets, so I'll show them when they arrive. Until then, here's a cat whose kittens have grown up and left home:

Homemade Australian Italian Villa ca 1950s

Here is another of my homemade Australian houses, the one I've most recently acquired. It is built in an earlier style than the Federation, Californian Bungalow and Arts & Crafts houses, but was probably actually made later than those houses.


The Italian Villa style flourished in the 1850s, particularly in Melbourne and Victoria generally, following the goldrushes. The style included features such as a stuccoed facade, arch-headed windows and stone paving at the front of the house, with clipped box hedges. I bought this from an ebay seller in Blackburn, an outer suburb of Melbourne. As a sheet of laminate is used to form the first floor, I think this dolls house was probably constructed in the 1940s or 50s, a century later than the real houses of this style which can still be seen in large numbers in Melbourne.

The house has been made with a lot of attention to detail. The stucco effect is created by sand stuck to the outside walls. The front door is painted to show moulded panels, and has a little door knob. A lamp used to hang in the porch, and there's a door mat for dolls to wipe their feet on:
Four flat, painted wooden topiary shrubs decorate the facade, and the ground storey windows at front and side are finished with window boxes filled with fabric flowers.

Inside, each room has skirting boards and simple cornices, and ceiling roses so typical of the era when Italian Villas were built. Only one lampshade is still hanging (in the living room), though another loose one came with the house. Here's the ceiling rose in the kitchen; this also shows the plastic laminate which the kitchen ceiling / bedroom and living room floor has been made out of:


My guess is that this dates from about the 1950s.

It's a small house, only 40 cm (16") high, with 15cm (6") high rooms, just the right size for my Australian metal furniture, and for Mr and Mrs Black, PI Angus Shand's clients (though even they have to bend to get through the front door!).


Mr and Mrs Black have just returned from a meeting with the private investigator, and Esmé Black is being greeted by two very enthusiastic dogs in the kitchen. She has already started laying out the afternoon tea.


The cupboard on the wall is built in. As well as the blue metal furniture, the kitchen is furnished with Australian 'Marquis' brand white and blue plastic furniture.

(The 'Marquis Mouldings' company, later the 'Commonwealth Mouldings' company, was established during World War II in the Sydney suburb of Arncliffe, near Mascot Airport. During both World Wars, companies producing dolls & toys started up in Australia, but didn't always survive post war when imported goods once again flooded in. The Marquis / Commonwealth plastics company, however, flourished into the 1960s, producing such varied goods as school rulers, kitchenware, and toilet seats.)

Upstairs, Harold Black is relaxing by listening to a record. He and his wife are very fond of music, and Esmé is quite an accomplished piano player.


The green piano and stool are part of the same range as the metal kitchen, living room and bedroom furniture. Not much is known about the maker, although it's thought possible that the EFCO Manufacturing Company, which made aluminium dolls' heads in the mid 1940s, may also have made this furniture. EFCO had its factory on the Prince's Highway at Arncliffe, just like Marquis / Commonwealth Mouldings.

The wooden pieces in the living room are by Barton (the bureau bookcase and TV) and Dol-toi (the radiogram), and the flying ducks on the wall are by Barrett & Sons.

The bedroom is decorated in pink and blue. To the blue metal furniture, I've added two little side tables by Barton, to hold the bedside lamps by Eagle Toys. The rugs here and in the living room are Westminster Tobacco premiums.
The cat has been asleep on the bed, but has heard Mr & Mrs Black returning, and is thinking of going down to see if any food is in the offing:


The maker of the Italian Villa had to improvise on some parts. It seems that large hinges were available to attach the front to the house, but the hinges holding the front door are made from leather and attached with tiny nails:


The hook which latches the front of the house closed is also handmade, from wire:


At the back, on the right side of the roof, is a chimney; it's not visible from the front of the house:

Homemade Australian - Leadlight Arts & Crafts style house, ca 1920s?

This is another of my homemade Australian houses. This one came from Victoria (the Australian state), from an ebay seller who used to have an antiques shop at Armadale, and who picked the house up at a local market. Whether the market was in Armadale, or what the history of the dolls house was before he found it at the market, I don't know.


It appears to be quite old, based on the lino flooring and the type of glass used in the windows. Also, a lot of paint has been lost from the roof, and some glass is missing from the windows. I'm not an expert on vintage glass or lino - I suspect it may date from the 30s, but possibly even earlier, ca 1920.
A great deal of work has gone into the exterior of this house; by contrast, the interior is very basic. The house has three remaining glass windows, and one which would originally have had glass in it.
This is the main leadlight window, from the outside:


(you can also see the beading in the woodwork in this photo);

and from the inside:


The texture and colours of the glass remind me of glass I've seen in houses built in the late 19th century and the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The front gable has another leadlight window, happily complete:


You can also see the shingles individually nailed to the face of the gable here. (And some clumsy repainting, which I haven't attempted to remove.)

The side gable window is sadly empty of glass, but the metalwork is also quite intricate:



The other side of the dolls house has a small window with a single pane of cobalt blue glass:


This side, unlike the other, has timber clapboard or weatherboard cladding. It also has two drainpipes (one complete, one half there):


I like to try to work out what architectural style the builder of each dolls house had in mind. I have a book called Australian House Styles by Maisy Stapleton and Ian Stapleton, with descriptions and drawings I can compare with the houses. In this case, I think the Arts & Crafts style (as expressed in Australia) may have been influencing the maker of this house. This style was common in the decade 1910-1920.

Here is part of Australian House Style's description of Arts and Crafts:

A multi-gabled roof swept over the building ....The deeply-pitched roof dipped into steeply-angled gullies, [or] formed hoods over windows ... The roof was supported by additional brackets and corbels ... exposed rafter ends peeking from beneath the roof's edge revealed the honesty of the construction.
... The multitude of roofline gables encouraged a variety of finishes, as if to prove the architect's imaginative skill. Shingles ... were typical. ... Sometimes a shaggy coating of weathered timber shingles crept over the entire upper storey or formed an apron below a porch or window opening. ...
The organic nature of the style led to a diversity of window forms, each somewhat perversely different from the other and scattered with abandon. There were strips of windows, with delicately tinted panes, bays of casements with a coloured glass frieze, oriel windows and small slit windows. [p. 60]

Several of these features were also typical of the Federation style, common in the decade before this - coloured glass windows, gables, shingling, etc. So perhaps the maker, clearly skilled in woodwork and metalwork, was simply including decorative features seen in many houses in the first two decades of last century, without being particularly focussed on any one style.

While the exterior is very detailed, the interior doesn't seem to have been given a lot of attention. There is no ceiling - the beams are exposed, and the inside of the roof is unfinished wood:

Beams are typical of Arts and Crafts houses, but usually within the ceiling!
Why is there a strip of wood running vertically down the back wall? and why a ledge running horizontally below the blue window? Were there perhaps partitions dividing the space into two or three rooms? With several rooms, and well-made soft furnishings, the interior could perhaps have been as decorative as the exterior.

The house didn't come with any furniture. I have furnished it with items which reflect its era (depression?), the patterned and coloured glass in the windows, and its new inhabitants - two cats!

Both cats are German - the one on the left, standing at the table, is a Kersa cat:

There is a large jug for milk, some chicken soup in a packet, and a (quite modern) whole chicken. Behind her is a framed photograph (to be hung) of an explorer cat, a relative of theirs, pictured at some ruins in Italy.

The other cat is a Schuco Bigo Fix cat. He is standing in front of a German kitchen dresser with clear patterned glass in the top. The bedding is from America - a lovely crazy patchwork quilt cover. The fireplace is homemade Canadian - on it is a portrait of a military ancestor, and a statuette of a very well-known ancestor wearing boots:


The green pressed glass is German; the cobalt glass English; the glass hen dish came from the US, and the jugs and glasses came from the UK and the US, but I think they may be German originally.
I was inspired to people a dolls' house with cats by Vivien Greene's Shell Villa, "a lodging house for cats in need of sea air, kept by Tabitha, Selina and Bramwell Twitchett." I've never seen any other cat dolls like hers, and I don't like dolls with cat heads and human hands and feet, while these German small-scale soft toy animals fit well here, and have articulated heads and limbs, allowing them to be posed.

Homemade Australian - Californian Bungalow style house, late 1920s

Here is another of my homemade Australian dolls houses. Like the Federation bungalow, this one also comes from Sydney, probably from the Centennial Park area. I loved the front of the house when I saw it on ebay:

I love the pylon-shaped window frames and door frame - wider at the bottom, narrower at the top. This shaping of exterior (and interior) timbers is typical of the very common architectural style known in Australia as 'Californian Bungalow', which was imported from California in 1916. Other features of this style are diamond-paned leadlight casement windows, and porthole windows in the front door (in real houses, usually filled with a stained glass design of an Australian native bird or animal).


This house is definitely not a bungalow, and it doesn't show as many features of this style as the Californian-bungalow style house in Dolls' Houses in Australia 1870-1950. But I think that the maker of this house definitely had this style in mind - and the white picket fence is so typical of Australian towns and suburbs.

The exterior has been repainted - perhaps fairly recently. The original colouring can be seen in places - creamy yellow on the walls, with grey trim (very similar to the Federation bungalow in reverse).

The interior is much plainer. When I bought it, it had wall and floor coverings dating to the 1950s:

The wallpaper in particular was falling off the walls. I have removed it, although I've left most of the flooring under the new floor papers. I discovered remnants of the original decoration. All rooms had heavily embossed cream wallpaper; the largest fragment is above the light switches:


Upstairs there was a flocked crimson floor covering:

and an olivey grey green patterned material downstairs:


Cream, deep pink and olive were fashionable colours for decorating Californian bungalows in the 1920s.

I couldn't hope to find enough vintage embossed wallpaper; I have one beautiful sample sheet, but you can't scan or photocopy embossing! Instead, I have used vintage sample papers of wallpaper - French this time, some of it thick and washable. So the house is much more decorative than it would originally have been.

Here is the living room.
It's 1929, and the man of the house is a well-to-do business man. He and his wife have recently been on a trip through Great Britain and the Continent, and have brought back souvenir books - of Inverness, Burns Country, the Krkonose Mountains, and Stuttgart. They are now entertaining two visitors from the Continent (I'm not sure exactly where), and the maid has served tea and coffee.


The furniture here is German, apart from the beautiful fireplace, which I think is English.


Upstairs is the nursery, where a governess and a nurse are supervising a tea party of four small children, as well as a toddler in a playpen and a baby in a cot:


The playpen and stroller are German, the sideboard is homemade Australian (and I think the table and chairs are too). The rest of the furniture at the back of the room, which you can see a bit better in this photo, is American - Wisconsin Toy Company nursery furniture from the 1930s.


I have bought vintage fabric to make curtains for each room. I'm keeping the curtains which came with the house, but not using them; they are transparent white nylon, and I think they date from the 1950s decoration of the house.
There is a light in each room; whether this was original (1920s) or installed later, I don't know. The wiring runs to the roof, where there was no doubt a battery - I haven't tried to get the lighting going again (yet).

In the main bedroom, there are two single beds - at the back, one in English oak (which comes with a dresser and wardrobe)

and at the front, a Wisconsin Toy Company 1930s "Moderne Bed Room Set". I bought this through a live auction on US ebay - it was not cheap! But the tapering lines of the furniture reflect the lines of the window and door frames on the front of the house.


In this room, the eldest daughter of the house and a friend are looking at the lengths of material they have just bought, and considering which of the designs in the Weldon Ladies Journal they will have them made up into:

Downstairs is the kitchen, where you can see the light switches and also the dagger-shaped curtain rod finials, which I think are most likely original (they are in all the rooms):



Cook's nephew has dropped in. He is unemployed, and tramping around with his cockatoo looking for work. Cook has fried up some bacon, eggs and tomatoes to give him a good feed before sending him off again, and is joining him for a cup of tea before she gets back to work. She is lucky to have a Triang kitchen range, though I hope she won't mind a modern new gas stove if I ever have a Triang house that needs a stove. (There's no frying pan, so she must have taken it out to the scullery, which, with the bathroom, is perhaps in a lean-to on the back of the house - though that is not typical of Californian bungalows).


Cook has a very large cookbook which she inherited from her mother. It contains recipes for sandwiches, salads, chafing dishes and cocktails!
The table and chairs here came with the sideboard now in the nursery - they are all homemade Australian. The cupboard on the right is now a cleaning cupboard (or will be when I get some brooms and dusters and so on). It has had a past life as a shaving cupboard and a pen and ink holder; I like its design.

As I've said, and as the calendars in the kitchen and living room show, I've set this house in 1929. I'm not sure of the actual date of construction, but there are some clues. Californian bungalows proliferated in the 1920s, and one part of this house has a trade name marked on it:


This is the underside of the roof, which can be lifted off. Presdwood is a trade name of masonite hardboard. It seems that it was invented in 1924, and was mass produced starting from 1929 - in America. I suspect that it would have been used to make the roof of a dolls' house in Australia a bit later than this, so perhaps the house really dates from the 1930s.