Rising interest in toy homes suggests people find solace and joy in tiny things – especially when real homes are so pricey
It’s the summer of Barbie, and I’m thinking about her Dream House. Wooden Puzzle For Children
Not its recent incarnations – so much pink and plastic! – but the 1962 folding cardboard original. The studio apartment came with modest furnishings: a small bed, a couch, books, a TV.
Yet this Dream House’s meaning resides in what it doesn’t contain: a kitchen, a bathroom, a nursery or a family. This is the mid-20th century bachelorette pad for a woman unencumbered by domestic obligations. I’ve often pictured myself sitting on that couch, alone and reading happily.
Though I never owned that Dream House, I understand its allure. Many others do too – interest in dollhouses and miniatures has been rising steadily for the past decade. All things miniature enthrall a new and younger generation of digital natives; social media brim with tiny wicker chairs, high-top sneakers the size of a fingernail, petite slices of cake destined for teeny tables in miniscule houses. More than 200,000 people follow The Book of Mini author Kate Ünver on Instagram for her mini picks, and the artist Paris Renfroe invented the term “minfluencer” for those who have catapulted small masterpieces into our public consciousness via the internet.
But why the boom in tiny homes, right now? Why do dollhouses so fascinate us? I’ve posed these questions to many artists, collectors and enthusiasts for the book I’m writing.
Social media has widened the audience for miniatures. When I was a child in the 1970s, if you didn’t have a dollhouse yourself, you’d have to find them in a museum or a miniature show. Now the world of dollhouses and miniatures is available 24/7 on screens we can hold in our hand.
Yet there’s something more crucial. In recent history, with the threats of climate change, social unrest, political turmoil and gun violence – so much instability – people have turned back to miniatures and found solace and joy in tiny things. In a sense, all dollhouses are dream houses, sites where creativity sets us free.
This became particularly evident during the pandemic. When the regular-sized world became increasingly frightening, many Americans took refuge in the small. In lockdown, people built tiny furniture, rehabbed dollhouses and crafted miniature food that didn’t require a trip to that suddenly dangerous place, the grocery store. When everything feels large and unsolvable, we can create a 1:12 scaled universe that we can command.
Dollhouses offer a heady mix of imagination and control. Tiny domiciles allow us to design the households and lives we want, from liberating spaces such as the Barbie Dream House to aspirational homes with the latest farmhouse chic aesthetic. Lauren Delaney, a New Orleans artist known for crafting miniature mysteries, described it well when she told me: “Miniatures are a way we work things out as human beings.” Dollhouses are so much more than toys. They allow us to envision different possibilities for our households and our lives.
More often than not, today’s miniature houses and furnishings don’t fit the 19th-century Victorian style commonly associated with “dollhouse”. As Darren Scala, owner of D Thomas Fine Miniatures, who coined the hashtag #rethinkdollhouse, likes to say: “This is not your grandmother’s dollhouse.”
I’ve watched my own daughters work out their lives through dollhouses. In 2006, as small children, my girls built a world called Dollhouse Land, which took over our dining room. Dollhouse land existed for six years, an elaborate town run by women (no men), with schools, stores, parks and houses. No sprawling mansions or traditional families anywhere. In my daughters’ imaginary adult lives, women lived communally in modern houses and studio apartments.
Central to Dollhouse Land was a set of American Girl Minis from a garage sale. Made only between 2000-2003, each box provided a specific fantasy of New York City life. Marketed to millennials, AG Minis showcased a glamorous dwelling (once again, no kitchens!), where a single woman might curl up on an aqua-colored beanbag and gaze at the city skyline.
The American Girl Loft Apartment offered a window view of the Twin Towers via a magnetic panel that slid on the wall. After 9/11, the company mailed owners of the loft mini a reissued skyline minus the towers. My daughters were too young to remember 9/11. But their miniature world did include other traumatic events: Hurricane Sandy, school shootings, epidemics of swine flu. They could play-act disaster in their utopian community, then set the world right anew.
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All manner of miniatures made up Dollhouse Land, and 20 years after AG Minis, the current dollhouse universe offers a wide range of contemporary architectural styles: mid-century modern bungalows, shabby chic, cottagecore, steampunk, farmhouse exteriors. These dollhouses are stunning and curated down to each doorknob and carefully arranged pillow. When I study them online, I have to remind myself I’m not looking into a real-size house. Indeed, design site Apartment Therapy has begun to feature contemporary dollhouse “house tours” that capitalize on this trick of the eye.
Why would anyone want to “tour” a miniature house online? Once again, the answer probably goes back to our current difficult real-size world. Because tiny houses we’re too big to live in are helping us navigate the housing crisis. We find pleasure and fulfillment in designing these houses precisely because so many of us can’t afford the home we really want.
While finding affordable housing has been challenging for years, the pandemic drove up rents, selling prices and interest rates. Housing is now more unaffordable than ever. As Aly J Yale notes in a recent piece on homeownership among Generations Y and Z: “Young millennials, who are typically first-time homebuyers, made up just 14% of purchases – down from nearly a quarter in 2021.”
Not incidentally, millennials are the demographic now most engaged in online miniature worlds, a place where they can easily own a home. How do they imagine it? The younger generation of miniacs is inspired by contemporary interior design from the 1950s to the present. Darren Scala explained to me: “The move to the current mini home trends is so much about this new generation making it all their own, expressing themselves in a new way based on their own likes dislikes and what’s actually available to them since there is so much more out there for them than what older generations had, which was only the Victorian style.” That is, so much more available in the miniature world, not the actual world in which we live.
The magazine House Beautiful’s recent engagement with dollhouses further reveals the connections between our homes and our miniatures. In 2020, it debuted Dollhouse Beautiful, which offered interior designers the chance to try miniature work. The first challenge gave them a standard Victorian mini house and $500 to decorate and design; their designs included a Parisian abode with a leopard sofa, tiny macarons and a boudoir with scarlet accents. The second makeover was a mid-century modern house. HGTV personality Breegan Jane’s dream house mimicked her own and featured ghost chairs in a yellow-walled dining room and a black toilet. The Los Angeles designer Melissa Warner Rothblum built a California-inspired backyard space with a swimming pool, a cabana and a ping pong table.
All of these California houses are luxurious, albeit in a contemporary way. Luxe seems to go hand in hand with modern in the new aesthetic found in the frequently used #moderndollhouse hashtag. “Modern” can refer to anything from mid-century to Brutalism, and often the furnishings and even the houses are 3-D printed. Rosa Moran uses Instagram reels with music to display her most recent dollhouse, all clean lines and beautifully lit. An Hermès blanket drapes a couch, and a gold pedestal table gleams in the dining room. The physician and miniaturist Kwandaa Roberts uses her own home as inspiration; the kitchens in her houses showcase top-end stainless steel appliances and beautiful backsplashes. Michael Yurkovic of Atomic Miniatures specializes in architectural models and precisely made period furnishings like Eames rockers and inches-tall 1950s tulip chairs (at $175 a pop).
China Toys Musical Baby Kate Ünver described a miniaturist to me as “above all, a creator – a conductor of their own symphony”. As the conductor, a miniaturist makes a dollhouse come alive. My real-sized self will never live in the Barbie Dream House, an American Girl Mini apartment or a mid-century modern bungalow from Dollhouse Beautiful. Yet I will never stop imagining myself inside.