Tudor Style Doll Houses
Tudors: Dollhouse With Old World Style
Tudor houses have an old world charm. When I was little, I traveled to the house where my father grew up. I was fascinated by how every house in his Long Island community was Tudor-style: cream-colored with exotic dark brown trim. When I moved to Seattle, I saw many similarly styled houses, looking whimsical and (to my eyes) dollhouse-like, set against a backdrop of plain wood or brick houses. Later that year, I made quite a find at the Capitol Hill Value Village: a huge dollhouse -- complet...

Cottage Style Dollhouse Furniture: Distressed Ivory
An Antique White Finish for Doll Furniture
Distressed ivory is an antique white finish that looks stunning on shabby chic or cottage style furniture -- either full scale or miniature. It is particularly well suited for doll furniture (especially if a collector has a tight budget but a taste for realism). Distressed ivory finishes can give cheap manufactured furnishing an elegant one-of-a-kind look, and make mismatched pieces look matching, or at least almost matching -- which is actually more true to the "shabby chic" look than true u...

Re-purposing: From Cabinet to Dollhouse
A Wall Mount Miniature display
My first dollhouse was a refurbished bathroom cabinet... a medicine cabinet, no less The selection, I admit, was more by necessity than choice. I was a very young woman in a housing co-op, short on cash and short on real furnishings -- but I had a penchant for painting and re-fashioning dollhouse furnishings. I had an old cabinet on hand, and it occurred to me that instead of having it on its side, acting as a stand in or a sewing basket, I could give it a decorative finish and use it to disp...