Growing up my father set out to build a dollhouse for my sister and me. It was three stories high, nine rooms, complete with an elevator on the outside operated by a pulley system. My mum used wallpaper samples to cover the walls and left over carpet and lino from our home renovation for the floors. The dollhouse was our pride and joy, and we played for it, admittedly, longer than we should have. One day it was sold to another young girl at a charity yard sale who would get just as much out of it as we did. While we thought this dollhouse was better than anything out there, we obviously had never seen Queen Mary’s.
Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was completed in 1924, for Queen Mary, the wife of King George V.
Sir Edwin Lutyens set out in the early 1920s to build Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. In 1924, the gift for Queen Mary, wife of King George V, was complete.
The idea came from Princess Marie Louise, the Queen’s cousin, who spoke to Sir Edwin, a top architect about the house at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Princess Marie Louise knew many people in the arts and had only the best artists and craftsmen to contribute their skills to the house.
The Dolls’ House even includes electricity, running hot and cold water, working lifts and flushing lavatories.
These skills went to building a collection of to scale items that are functional. Elements such as water running through the tiny pipes: “There are shotguns that ‘break and load’ (and may even fire), monogrammed linens, … ‘electricity and lifts, a garage of cars with engines that run.”
Created as a gift from the people to Queen Mary, it also serves as a historical demonstration of how a royal family lived during that period.
Made on a scale of 1:12, it stands over three feet tall and is decked out with products from famous companies of the time. Many of the remarkable 1:12 replicas are of items in Windsor Castle and produced by the same companies themselves or specialist model makers. All the curtains, carpets, and furnishings are copies of the real thing. The lights all turn on, and bathrooms fully plumbed complete with a flushing toilet and appropriately sized lavatory paper.
Possibly my favorite aspect of the dolls’ house is the library, stocked full of books bounds in scale size. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contributed How Watson Learned the Trick and M.R James wrote The Haunted Dolls’ House. Additional authors J.M Barries, Rudyard Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham and Thomas Hardy all had their works in the library. Eli Marsden Wilson was just one painter to provide some of the many pictures and with no detail overlooked the bottles in the wine cellar where each topped off with the proper drink to match the labels.
A hidden garden lays in a large drawer revealed when pulled out from beneath the main building. In keeping with the rest of the home, high-end replicas of greenery in the traditional ornamental theme are present throughout.
First exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition from 1924-1925 where over 1.6 million people viewed the masterpiece, the house was later on display to raise money for the Queen’s charities.
If you wish to view the miniature house still complete today, you can find it on display in Windsor Castle and marvel at its wonder.
Photo Credit: Cindy Stockman 2015
