Project Doll's House

So, your daughter would love to have a doll's house? No problem, a few clicks on the internet, and Santa is tipped off and knows what to bring. Easy. But then you realise, doll's houses, at least the nice ones, are expensive, and looking at your shed you think, "I can do that myself! How hard can it be?"

Now then, first the planning phase. How many floors? How wide? How tall? Should there be windows? What about a staircase? — Some brief investigation on the interweb, and one finds that a common scale for doll's houses is 1:12. This might come from the fact that there are 12 inches to the foot, or for the metric world, a doll's house featuring a floor-to-ceiling height of 20 cm is equivalent to a room height of 2.40 m in the real world, which is pretty much standard. Now that we know the scale, paper and pencil will do the rest. Here's the first draft (click for bigger version):

So the doll's house planned here will have two full floors and an accessible attic. The attic will be one large room, and the floors will each have one large room, one small room, and a staircase/corridor. The sizes of the rooms in this plan are not final yet, but they give the right direction. A room of 3 m by 3 m is rather small and does not fit large furniture well. Therefore planning for a living room of 4 m by 4 m or so makes sense. This means roughly 34 cm width. The staircase should be two metres wide, that's roughly 16 cm in the doll's world. The staircase is planned with half-way landings, and then folding back. The smaller room could be 3 m wide or so, which means 25 cm. Then one needs to account for the width of the walls, and the base plate should maybe be a couple of cm wider on all sides. Thus we easily end up with a house of something like 75 cm wide, 40 cm deep, and 60 cm high. Yes, that's big...

In the next blog post, I will discuss the exact measurements.

Photo and design: Thomas Ulich.