Category Archives: miniatures

Modernity.

I spend a lot of time thinking about design. The things I like, the things I hate, and everything in-between. Design encompasses a strikingly large part of my life: web design, clothing design, furniture design, architectural design, industrial design, project design, interior design, lighting design. Yep, I think that covers it.

I have always been drawn to particular types of design, even though my taste has varied and been refined dramatically over time. I remember the first time I saw artwork by Max Ernst. I was so taken aback, and at the same time so enthralled. I started researching his work and it didn’t take a lot of time before I discovered Marcel Duchamp and Bauhaus. So thank you Max Ernst, for teaching me about Bauhaus.

As soon as I started reading about the design movement sparked from Bauhaus, I knew I had finally found my design alignment. This is how it works, I find, for most people. You will stumble around liking different things and then trip over your own two feet and land face-first in the design movement you love, and it’s easy after that.

One of the biggest projects I presently have up my sleeve is miniature house design. You’re going to see a lot of it very soon, and it will be worth the wait I promise. I’ve been exceedingly happy to finally put that architecture training to good use and build some houses- albeit houses that are 1/12th the size you’d need for people.

In my quest to build some strong, striking houses I did what any person does anymore – I went to the internet and spent hours upon hours doing image searches. And what I kept finding was people showing me “contemporary” houses, not “modern” houses. This annoyed me because, honestly, I don’t think I’ve liked a single contemporary house that I saw.

Most contemporary houses are still quite traditional – they have traditional materials, the shapes are pretty standard  and the detail is way too fussy. Please do not put a six-panel door on a house and try to tell me it is in any way modern. Post-modern, sure, assuming the panels are made out of some fantastic material (mirrors maybe?) or arranged in a really stunning way.

“Contemporary” refers to “of the present”. Designs that are trendy. Now, a “trendy” design has a dramatically different lifespan depending on the subject matter, but in houses, trends tend to last a little over a decade.

“Modern” refers to those fabulous designs originating from Bauhaus. Clean, striking lines. Not a lot of ornamentation. Fantastic materials and bright colours. I think a lot more people would fall in love with modern homes if they were given the opportunity.

“Post-Modern” refers to designs that are a response to modernism. These tend to be houses that have a sense of humour.They include out-there details, fun colours, “art for art’s sake”. These designs are harder to sell en masse, generally, because they tend to be very personal. What one designer sees as a loving bit of quirky accents, a home buyer may see as a weird purple wavy ceiling.

I wish there were more modern buildings around. It is finally being embraced as a movement, which I have been hearing labelled “Modern Modernism”. Not as stark as the Bauhaus days, but certainly not as traditional as those silly contemporary buildings.

Do you have a favourite modern design? I’d love to see some examples. I’m knee-deep in tiny blueprints, and I’m going to start making some prototypes ASAP.

Dollhouse – Newport

The story of the Newport Dollhouse is long and agonising. I started building it 11 years ago .. ! At some point it got packed up and tucked away for a long time while I persued other hobbies and lived in places that did not easily have space for giant miniature houses.

I got it back last year, though, and have been working on it on and off. I had quite a few fits with it – my taste in style has changed wildly since I began working on it. I would have left well enough alone except it had never been finished, and I no longer had the paint to match it.

So the poor house went through 8 different coats of paint. When I took it back up last week it looked like this:

As you can see I reconsidered the colour of it more than once.

I taped everything off:

And then hit it with spray paint:

Taped everything off again, so that I could paint the trim and I ended up with this:

I also ripped off the old shingles, which I hated pretty badly (Also I had not finished shingling the roof and was missing a bunch – that played a very large part in this decision.) I covered the roof in roof tar. It looks nice and should be cured in a week or so. (In the meantime my studio smells fierce…)

I did not change the interior, though. I can’t… that’s how it will always look to me. I have tried playing around with different furniture in it and I just can’t do it. (I have enough furniture to fill 12 dollhouses, which may or may not be because I’ve built 12 dollhouses.)

A tour of the inside:

The living room/entry room. Can you spot the magazines in the rack and the books on the sofa? You can’t see it because of the coat-rack, alas, but there is also mail on the side table.

The dining room. A very difficult room to capture because it sits behind the kitchen. In retrospect I would use a different wallcovering. This is not formal at all and I’m not sure why I painted the trim green, other than the fact that the wallpaper has green in it. I love the dining room because the table is set properly. It’s this kind of detail I love.

The kitchen is my least favourite room – it has very poor placement but is the best you can get with the design of the house. Open-backed houses are really awkward to design around. I do love that there is a pile of dishes in the sink. If you look closely you’ll even see some homework on the kitchen table, complete with a (to-scale) ruler. Tiny geometry!

Upstairs is the main bedroom. Also not my taste anymore, but I still like it. You’ll notice the door is ajar – the doors all open and the knobs are drilled through.

The music room. I was very excited about this room when I made it.. I love the wallpaper (still!) and I think the mix of so many woods is very exotic. There are quite a few little instruments in this room, including an organ. It was a pipe organ; I took the pipes off.

Stairwell. I did not get a photo of the room it leads up to, because it’s nothing special. The Newport layout is a little weird and does not really give you any room to move around. So this is kind of the clutter room.

In the attic is the office/sewing room. See the little spools of thread? The chair is one of my favourite pieces, the wheels move on the bottom! I also love the filing cabinet, it’s not something you see that often.

The bath. It has really awful placement and I’m not sure why they put the walls there..? It also feels weird to me to have a house without a bathroom, so it went into the weird room. This house was the beginning of my obsession with bathrooms… you can either get the large, clunky porcelain sets or the wood ones like this. This is a very pretty set (I love the stopper in the tub, by the way) but it is quite old fashioned. We can certainly do better…

And lastly, the girls’ room. I recovered the beds to have the same fabric as the ceiling and the table. I love how coordinated it all is. I also love the little dollhouse. it’s 1:144 scale, which means it is dollscale-scale to the dollhouse. The inside is decorated, too, though I don’t have any furniture for it.

And this is the Newport! It’s one of the biggest, more impressive dollhouse kits that I have ever seen. I’m not sure if it is the biggest I’ve ever made, though, I’d have to go through my collection. I like big houses.

If I was starting this from the beginning today, it’d look very different. But I’m still quite happy with it now, and I’m very happy to put it on my completed list!