In early 1932, Walter Lines summoned his architect. He wanted to build a perfect house. It was a special commission for Peggy, his six-year-old daughter, who was soon to celebrate her seventh birthday. Lines ran a successful toy manufacturing company, which made the popular Triang doll’s houses. Peggy’s house, a birthday present, was to be a one-off, designed just like the family’s real home.
More than 80 years on, the doll’s house belongs to Peggy’s nephew, and it will take its place alongside 11 others in a new exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, east London. All the houses have stories to tell about the families who created and played with them. While bricks and mortar homes have been sold on, these treasured diminutive houses, often based on owners’ actual dwellings, have passed down from generation to generation.
Peggy never married or had children and her doll’s house stayed with her, in her childhood home, until her father died in 1972 and their home was sold. Peggy and the doll’s house then moved to her own home in Devon.
Today, it belongs to her nephew, Anthony Lowth. As a child, Anthony, 53, loved to visit his grandparents and Aunt Peg at Leigh Place, their sprawling house in Surrey. “It was a fabulous place, a child’s dream,” he recalls. “The doll’s house was always sitting in a big window, which looked down towards a lake.”
The doll’s house is a simplified version of the building (which dated from the 1600s), with the addition of mock Tudor beams, fashionable at the time. One of its main features is a large oak-panelled hallway, a copy of the one at Leigh Place, along which Anthony and his siblings enjoyed racing their bikes. “My grandmother was a saint, she wouldn’t turn a hair at cycling indoors,” he recalls.
The house was never short of childish attention: “My younger sister and cousins played with it. There were always children around. It was never an ornament. It was a proper toy.”
The resulting wear and tear is, for Anthony, part of its appeal. “It is obviously a house that had been thoroughly played with. The furniture is a higgledy-piggledy collection. It reflects its past and its place in the family history, and it always reminds me of having Peg around.”
Peggy, who died in 2011, kept the doll’s house for several years, but eventually she gave it to Anthony’s eldest brother for his children. They were so delighted that they began to play with it before the adults had a chance to move it indoors from the driveway – Peggy was delighted. “It was very special to her. She wanted it to be played with.”
For several years, Peggy was chairman of the renowned Hamleys toy shop (the company was at one time owned by Lines Bros) and her interest in toys was lifelong. “Her house was filled with things which people would have thought were museum pieces yet she had children crawling all over them. She rather frowned on the idea of toys being collectors’ items.”
Peggy wasn’t the only one who felt like that. As a little girl, Susanna Pinney, now 72, loved playing with her mother Betty’s childhood doll’s house – it was “very much a toy, I could do as I pleased with it”. Their shared interest really developed when Betty bought a large empty doll’s house after her four children had grown up.
It was a Gothic design, with more than 10 rooms and a working lift. She spent the next 20 years restoring and furnishing it.
“It was an easy, happy part of our relationship, something we enjoyed together. I sometimes made or found things for her. We would giggle over the stories she invented for the characters. Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and I think she found real life tough, but the doll’s house enabled her to create a fantasy world, an escape. I understood those feelings from my own childhood.”
Betty, an artist and illustrator, collected and painstakingly made hundreds of miniature decorations, fixtures and fittings for the doll’s house. She commissioned a carpenter to make precise copies of the family’s own Georgian dining table and chairs and Steinway grand piano.
“There are so many hours of work – it had to be perfect. She was totally absorbed by it. The house is just as she wanted it, and when I see it I am reminded how she always lived her life as an artist. I always loved watching her work,” says Susanna.
“The house reflects my mother. She was recreating her childhood but she made an idealised version, more exciting than her very strict Edwardian childhood.”
Betty grew up in Oxford, where her father was a professor at Christchurch college, and then in a Georgian manor house in Dorset, where he became a rector. She, like the inhabitants of her doll’s house, was accustomed to having staff. “She said butlers always had paunches and footmen were chosen for their elegant calves, so she had someone carve the dolls appropriately.”
New dolls were always given a role. “As well as being fastidious about scale, she also objected to inactive dolls. She wanted all hers to be doing things. She made tiny dusters for the maids when she plucked a pheasant.”
Not long before Betty died in 1982, Susanna bought her two male dolls. Her mother was too ill with cancer to dress them. “They are the only two dolls in their shop clothes. She always made exquisite outfits for them.”
The house was left to Susanna but now lives at the Museum of Childhood. “We are such a large family and it is so special. How do you divide up a doll’s house? Who has the room to display it properly? It is hard to let go because it was so much a part of my mother, but I thought it best to leave it to the museum,” she explains.
Alice Sage, curator of the exhibition, believes that doll’s houses offer a fascinating window on how people have lived through the ages. “They are not always a direct reflection of houses in the past, but they tell us little stories about the way people felt about home, about family relationships.”
The exhibition includes a contract, drawn up in 1837, between a father and daughter. She is to pay a shilling rent every month for her doll’s house and to guarantee no real fires will be lit. He retains the right to repossession, but only subject to two days’ written notice.
“Certainly in earlier times these houses came with responsibility. There was an expectation a girl would rise to the challenge of looking after the house,” says Alice. “It was seen as a way of educating them in how to run a real home.”
Like Peggy Lines’s house, several others in the collection were gifts from fathers to daughters. In many instances, the house and furniture would be made by the father. “It was a special gift, a material connection. Subsequent generations would add things to the houses, pass on the creative skills, often mother to daughter,” says Alice. “Real experiences were played out in them. It is a richly detailed way of sharing a family story.”
• Small Stories: At Home in a Doll’s House is at the Museum of Childhood from 13 December to September 2015, museumofchildhood.org.uk
Lauren Child: ‘I’ve always been fascinated by doll’s houses’
“I can never remember a time I wasn’t fascinated by doll’s houses,” says Lauren Child, the author and illustrator. Her version of The Princess and the Pea, set in a doll’s house, is republished this month, and next year she will present a BBC documentary on the Museum of Childhood’s exhibition and her own lifelong passion for the subject. “You either are or you aren’t a doll’s house person,” she says. “The real thing is a total fascination which does not go away.”
The middle girl of three, Child had her first doll’s house a communal one, made by their father, an art teacher. “To me it wasn’t a doll’s house, because it was all open. It was a toy.”
A real doll’s house, she explains, needs walls, a way of hiding the inside away. It should look like a real house. “The detailing all has to be right. The doors having proper little catches on them, the lights working, the cupboards opening.”
Childhood outings to museums and stately homes, where she would seek out doll’s houses, pasting their pictures into her scrapbook, fuelled Child’s longing for a proper doll’s house.
She savoured visits to a school friend whose mother, Pat, had built one from an old cupboard. “It was exactly the kind I wanted,” she says.
When Child was eight, Pat, at the request of the delighted little girl’s parents, found her a cupboard at auction. She cut out the windows and put in the floors. The correct scale allowed for three, but Pat agreed to Child’s request for four. “She understood that a doll’s house has to be exactly how you want it. That was very important.”
With some plywood and a tiny fretsaw, Child set about fashioning furniture. Her early efforts were not a success. “It took a million years to cut things badly. It was awful.”
Recognising her frustration, Child’s father persuaded the woodwork teacher at his school to let Child come in on Saturdays. “So, Mr Gray and I made doll’s house furniture. He didn’t know anything about doll’s houses but he was very into things being structurally sound.”
No one in the family, Child says, really understood how important this tiny world was to her. “It sounds terrible but I remember the disappointment of getting a bike for Christmas when all I wanted was some lovely little thing for the house.”
Retreating into her miniature world always offered escape. “It was more than a break from the rough and tumble of family life, it took me away from worrying things, it was a way of living in a world where you felt safe.”
Doll’s houses are powerful tools for children, she says. “They can order and control their life, jump into a perfect world where families really like each other all the time.”
Over the past 30 years, Child has made and bought its tiny decorations and furnishings. “I will go to doll’s house festivals and come back with tiny, tiny paper bags.”
A favourite buy was a 100-year-old china maid, now much loved by her four-year-old daughter, Tuesday. “She is the tiniest thing, too small for most houses, so she hadn’t sold.” While many collectors obsess over scale, Child enjoys playing with it. “I love the Hunca Munca thing. Suddenly you will get a giant kettle on the table. This maid couldn’t reach the sink. You have to create a story to make it work.” GR
• The Princess and the Pea, by Lauren Child, is published by Puffin, £6.99
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