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:

Some houses which didn't eventuate ...

When I started buying more furnishings for my dolls houses, I was living in a tiny town in the middle of the Northern Territory, and buying online was the only option. I still buy most of my dolls houses and furnishings online, and mostly it works out well. One or two small packages have got lost in the post - but some dolls houses haven't even started out.
When a dolls house I'm particularly interested in is listed as 'pick up only', I sometimes email to ask if the seller could pack it for collection by a courier. I've received some beautiful houses from sellers who did so, including the Federation bungalow. On a couple of occasions, though, the seller has agreed to pack the house, so I bid on it and won - and nothing happened. Either it was just too much trouble to pack it, or the seller decided that the freight costs were too high and not worth the value of the dolls house - even though I would be the one paying the freight!
Here are two houses that didn't get past a winning bid.


This one really appealed to me, with the painted stonework and wooden gable on the outside, and a central spiral staircase inside:


Soon after I won it in 2006, a house with an identical staircase was listed by a UK seller:


As well as the staircase, the window and door frames are the same, so perhaps they are by the same maker. The UK one was identified by Marion Osborne as "made by Playcraft which was a subsidiary of Mettoy. Dated from about 1965 to early 70's."
The house in Australia which I won in 2006 was recently relisted. I would love to have the house, but doubted that I would get any further this time (unless perhaps I used a service which picked up, packed, and freighted).

Another house which didn't come through was a home-made one, fairly plain on the inside, but including a lean-to garage and a garden:


I hope it has found an appreciative home somewhere.

A couple of houses I've won recently haven't started out yet, so I'm hoping that they don't end up as no-shows too!

Lines Letchworth Doll's House 1912-1914

This is the third house from my grandmother - my sister's house, which my grandmother called 'Roseville' after the place we lived when my sister was a baby. I sent photographs of this house to Marion Osborne in 2002, along with the photos of my Lines house (No. 17). Marion Osborne identified this one as the Letchworth doll's house, which appeared in Harrods catalogues in 1912 and 1914. It does not appear in her reference book Lines and Tri-ang Dollshouses and Furniture 1900-1971, as she did not then have the information.


I'm sorry that this photo is a bit washed out - I took it some time ago. However, it does show the front pretty clearly. The house is a bit of a mystery - in the catalogue, it is described and shown as having an open front, and a related house, the "Garden City", is shown with open sides as well as an open front. Marion Osborne thought it was possible that Lines had changed the design, but not the artwork, to include sides and a front - she noted that the balustrades and pediments were correct (except the flat balustrades downstairs).
The house has definitely been repainted. When my grandmother acquired this house, in the 1960s, not much was known of dolls' house makers. I do remember my grandmother remarking on the blue mansard roof, and the house may have been thought to be a French 'Blue Roof' house (since identified as actually made by the German company Gottschalk). The original roofing would most likely have been tiled paper.
Several of the original green window blinds have survived.

This is the left side of the dolls' house, with the front door.


Inside are two small rooms, decorated by my grandmother as a kitchen and children's room. All rooms have the original Lines fireplaces (though I'm not sure that the paint colours are all original).



In the kitchen, the kitchenmaid Bessie is at work. Bessie and the parlour-maid Darlow are cloth dolls which were given to my sister when she was small, and are most likely modern (1960s).



The large central rooms are furnished as a dining room, where another maid is cleaning out the fireplace:


and drawing room, where Darlow has just shown in a visitor.



The rooms have been repapered. As Marion Osborne pointed out, the red and gold paper in the dining room appears in a 1952 Hobbies catalogue, along with the parquet floor paper (surprisingly described as 'Lino Floor Paper'). A tiny bit of the original floor paper can be seen in the doorway between the drawing room and the children's room. I don't have a good picture of it - I think of it as oakleaf patterned tiles.

On the far side is the staircase, with doors leading into the two large central rooms. I think the paint, including the lines, on the staircase may be original; on some of the internal doors, faint lines are visible under the paint, suggesting that they may originally have been decorated like the staircase, and repainted at some time.


Thank you very much Marion for identifying this dolls' house!

Also seen on ebay - Mikro House and Cubes

After reading Mini Modern's request for input into affordable modern dolls' houses, I was thinking about modern Australian architecture - not MacMansions, but Glenn Murcutt, for instance. I started looking around Australian ebay for architects' models. I didn't find any (this time), but I came across the Mikro House:



- not a dolls' house, or an architect's model, but a model constructed from one pre-cut sheet of stainless steel "only 150 micron thick". The central walls are 8cm square. Wow!

Mikro Mart also produce Living Cubes, 7cm high - Work, Eat, Bath and Garden. I particularly like the garden -

What a lovely place to sit and be refreshed!

Seen on ebay: 1960s Ideal dolls' house & ?70s Vero

I'm hoping to have time over the weekend to clean and photograph another dolls' house or two. I've been spending a bit of time this week looking for furnishings for my Kaleidoscope house, getting inspiration from other bloggers' sites, and looking at modern dolls' house furniture makers' websites as well as ebay. I'm particularly looking for kitchen, bathroom and living room furniture - the latter because I doubt I'll find (and win) a Kaleidoscope lounge suite, and the others because I'd like a bit more detail than the originals have.
I came across these dolls' houses on ebay:


This was on German ebay, and it's a Vero Erika house.

I've seen pictures of other Vero houses from the 60s (bottom of page) and 70s on a virtual museum of German dolls' houses, and on The Shopping Sherpa's blog, and I actually have a Vero bungalow, which I must set up (first, I have get more shelves put up, so I have somewhere to put all these houses!).
This one I hadn't seen before. It's furnished with a mishmash of styles, but what caught my eye was the simple design, and the very groovy floor patterns:

Top right:

Top left:

Bottom right:

Bottom left (unfortunately you can't see much of the floor):

and the balcony:

I would love to furnish this house! but the seller was not posting it out of Germany.

Another one, with very similar design, was also listed on German ebay:
Not such groovy floors, but a great staircase.

UPDATE: Karin Wester has very kindly identified this house as one made in the Netherlands by OKWA. Diepuppenstubensammlerin has one too.

On US ebay, I saw this house, a folding cardboard house which the seller stated was made by Ideal in 1963 (I'm not sure which Ideal, and now I wish I'd asked for a photo of the maker's name):


I would have bid for it (cardboard is surely lighter than wood or metal, for shipping), but the dimensions exceeded those accepted by the USPS.

This is the living room (with extra patio furniture):


and a bedroom with team pennants on the wall:


The kitchen:
It looks like a few pieces are missing, but still, it's a nice mix of early 1960s pastels, with some orange creeping in to the living room. And so easy to store!

Casa Mañana plans sold on ebay

One of the dolls' houses in the 1999/2000 exhibition and book Dolls' Houses in Australia 1870-1950, called Casa Mañana by its current owner, was constructed in the 'ocean liner' style popular in the 1930s and '40s.


Some plans for a very similar house just popped up on ebay, and I wouldn't be surprised if Casa Mañana was built following these plans:




The auction contained an excerpt from the text:

"Just think of the pleasure the youngsters will get from this modern doll house! Up-to-the-minute styling makes it easy to build, for simplicity is always a feature of modern design."

Given dimensions: 29 x 18 x 20.

The plans were published in 1937, when the ocean liner style was at its height. Casa Mañana was thought to be made c 1950 - perhaps it's a little older, if it was made following these plans.

Marx Imagination house on ebay

While I do have several tin litho dolls houses, I've never really warmed to those produced by the American company Marx. Not sure why. But it seems that they also produced a plastic dolls' house in 1965 called the Imagination dollhouse. I don't have many reference books on 20th century dolls houses, so I've just discovered this house on US ebay, where there is one listed at the moment:
Wow.
I love the rich combination of colours, and the shapes in the window panels:


The house itself is made of transparent coloured plastic panels which can be assembled in different configurations - a bit like the Bozart Kaleidoscope house, with more scope for changing the layout of the rooms and shape of the house.
The ebay auction is listed with shipping to the UK, so perhaps they'd ship to Australia - but I suspect the final price will be very high, even without the cost of shipping it.

Update: The house sold for only US $204.49, which does not seem much considering it was fully furnished and came with original instructions.
I've just come across another Marx Imagination house, owned by Kathy, while browsing through minimodern's blog archive. Kathy has furnished hers spectacularly with wonderful retro furniture and accessories by a whole lot of different brands, rather than using the moulded plastic Marx Imagination furniture. I love it!