Dollhouse Furniture display - My Dolly's Home

My Dolly's Home, front cover

The new dollhouse furniture display areas have now been fitted out with backgrounds adapted from Doris Davey's ~1920/1921 "My Dolly's Home".

Davey's book is a charming book that lets readers explore a flattened-out dollhouse - they can move between rooms by hinged doors, look inside cupboards, and peek over garden fences – it's essentially the equivalent of a modern interactive children's "tablet" app, but executed in paper in the early 1920s.

Changing the backgrounds to fit the proportions of the display space required a certain amount of digital trickery, with items of furniture being moved, new areas of wall being "cloned" or invented, new graduated stipplework being produced to allow pairs of pages to merge seamlessly together (which they sometimes didn't in the original artwork), and the recreation of occasional furniture legs and corners that were no longer obscured by other objects once we'd "stretched" a room.

The justification for all this work was our determination to produce a set of backgrounds that were stylistically absolutely in-period for the early C20th, to create an appropriate context for the actual exhibits. Most people admiring the dollhouse furniture will never stop to look at the backgrounds, and if they do, never notice all the digital reworking that we carried out, but that's exactly as it should be.

Dollhouse Furniture display stands

Preparation work for our new dollhouse furniture display for Arch 2 continues...

We now have the two side-stands completed and in position in the alcove. Work still to be done includes kitting out the individual rooms with flooring and backdrops, completing renovation work on the Gottschalk dollhouse that will be standing between them, deciding on the auxiliary exhibit material for the display, and then ... finally ... getting our C19th/C20th dollhouse furniture out of storage, sorting it, and then deciding which pieces are going to get to go on display.

Since the rooms and their backdrops are modular and interchangeable, the tentative plan is that if it turns out that we still have too much important material to display at once, we may be able to rotate individual rooms on and off display. We'll see how it goes.