Ginny's Attic - Dolls Houses and Accessories.
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Dolls Houses the vast choice!

We currently offer in excess of 60 1:12th scale miniature Dolls House kits. Within our range you will find not only a Dolls House kit to suit all budgets but also a variety of styles which include Tudor, Georgian, Victorian, Cottages, Mansions, Modern and Dolls House Shops. Along with our extensive range of houses we also offer a range of basements designed and manufactured to compliment individual and specific Dolls House.

Along with our extensive range of Dolls House we also offer an exciting collection of childrens wooden Le Toy Van dolls houses and accessories which are all based on traditional designs and concepts. Le Toy Van products are designed in the UK, with high play value & stylish aesthetics as the key criteria for development. All toys are safety tested and carry the appropriate certification. Le Toy Van toys stimulate real play in today's world, naturally developing key educational skills in communication, discovery, social and creative development.

In addition to our Le Toy Van childrens range we have aqlso just taken delivery of a new Childrens Dolls Hous and range of wooden accessories. Over the coming months we will be adding a vast range of Dolls Houses and Accessories to EBAY at very special prices all of which will be available on EBAY here.

Famous Dolls Houses

Famous Dollhouses

One of the most famous and well planned dollhouses is Queen Mary's Dolls House which was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Queen Mary's Dolls' House was a magnificent dollhouse built in the early 1920s, completed in 1924, for Queen Mary, the wife of King George V of the United Kingdom. The idea for building the dollhouse originally came from the queen's cousin, Princess Marie Louise, who discussed her idea with the one of the top architects of the time, Sir Edwin Lutyens at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1921. Sir Edwin agreed to build the dollhouse and began preparations. Princess Marie Louise had many connections in the arts, and arranged for the top artists and craftsmen of the time to contribute their specialties to the house. As a result, the dollhouse has an amazing collection of miniature items that actually work. It was created as a gift to Queen Mary from the people, and to serve as an historical document on how a royal family might live during the period in England. It showcased the very finest and most modern goods of the period. Later the dollhouse was put on display to raise funds for the queen's charities. It was originally exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924/5, and is now on display in Windsor Castle, at Windsor, Berkshire, United Kingdom as a tourist attraction, especially to people with an interest in miniature houses and furniture.

Queen Mary's Dolls House

It was made to a scale of 1:12 (one inch to the foot), is over three feet tall, and contains models of products of well known companies of the time. It is remarkable for its detail and the detail of the objects within it, many of which are 1/12th replicas of items in Windsor Castle. These were either made by the companies themselves, or by specialist modelmakers, such as Twining Models of Northampton, England. The carpets, curtains and furnishings were all copies of the real thing, and even the light fittings were working. There is for example a flushable toilet, complete right down to the lavatory paper. In addition, well known writers such as Rudyard Kipling wrote special books which were written and bound in scale size and painters provided miniature pictures. Even the bottles in the wine cellar were filled with the appropriate wines and spirits, and the wheels of motor vehicles were properly spoked.

About Dolls Houses and the History of Dolls Houses

About Dollhouses

A dollhouse is either a toy or collectors home, made in miniature. For the last century, dollhouses have primarily been the domain of children but their collection and crafting have also fascinated a large number of adults. The very same dollhouses often appeal to both groups but very young children (age 3 years and under) should be restricted from access to the great majority of these domestic replicas because of choking hazards.

Today's doll's house traces its history directly back about four hundred years to the "baby houses" of Europe. The baby houses were cabinet display cases made up of rooms. The cabinets were built with architectural details and filled with miniature household items and were solely the playthings of adults. They were off-limits to children, not because of safety concerns for the child but for the dollhouse. Such cabinet houses were trophy collections owned by the few matrons living in the cities of Holland, England and Germany who were wealthy enough to afford them, and, fully furnished, were worth the price of a modest full-size house's construction.

As time went on, smaller doll houses with more realistic exteriors became evident in Europe.

Dollhouse History

Miniature homes, furnished with domestic articles and resident inhabitants (both people and animals), have been made for thousands of years. The earliest known examples were found in the Egyptian Tombs of the Old Kingdom, created nearly five thousand years ago. These wooden models of servants, furnishings, boats, livestock and pets placed in the Pyramids almost certainly were made for religious purposes. The earliest known European dollhouses are from the Sixteenth Century. These baby or cabinet houses showed idealized interiors complete with extremely detailed furnishings and accessories (mostly hand made).

The early European dollhouses were each unique, constructed on a custom basis by individual craftsmen. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, factories began mass producing toys, including dollhouses and miniatures suitable for furnishing them. German companies noted for their dollhouses included Christian Hacker, Moritz Gottschalk, Elastolin, and Moritz Reichel. The list of important English companies includes Siber & Fleming, Evans & Cartwright, and Lines Brothers (which became Tri-ang). By the end of the Nineteenth Century American dollhouses were being made in the United States by The Bliss Manufacturing Company.

Germany was the producer of the most prized dollhouses and doll house miniatures up until The Great War. Notable German miniature companies included Marklin, Rock and Garner and others. Their products were not only avidly collected in Central Europe, but regularly exported to Britain and North America. Germany's involvement in WWI seriously impeded both production and export. New manufacturers in other countries arose.

The Toy Furniture Shop of Providence, Rhode Island (The TynieToy Company) made authentic replicas of American antique houses and furniture in a uniform scale beginning in about 1917.

Other American companies of the early Twentieth Century were Roger Williams Toys, Tootsietoy, Schoenhut, and the Wisconsin Toy Co. Dollhouse dolls and miniatures were also produced in Japan, mostly by copying original German designs.

After WW II dollhouses became mass produced in factories on a much larger scale, and with less detailed craftsmanship, than ever before. By the 1950's the typical dollhouse sold commercially was painted sheet metal filled with plastic furniture. The cost of these houses was low enough to allow the great majority of girls from the developed western countries that were not struggling with rebuilding after WWII to own a dollhouse.


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