The home of Carl and Karin Larsson is "an icon in Swedish home decor and family life". A visit, or perhaps it should be called a pilgrimage, was made last week to see the settings for Carl Larsson's colourful, affectionate, almost photographic watercolours of domestic life. The tiny village of Sundborn has become a magnet for tourists but, happily, the house, its interiors and surroundings remain instantly recognisable from Larsson's images.

While most of us don't have nurseries with space for a waist-high mock-Tudor, and modern children aren’t perhaps as delighted by shrunken domesticity as they once were, there is a booming adult collectors' market. Above is a small collection of kitchen fittings, dressers and appliances, some of which are designed to live in the iconic Swedish Lundby dolls’s houses of the 1970s. Eagle-eyed readers might be able to spot a few miniature Persephone Books.

In 1928, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious were commissioned to paint murals to 'cheer up' the walls of Morley College in Lambeth. The paintings generated huge interest and were even visited by the aforementioned Queen Mary. Above is Ravilious’s Life in a Boarding House, depicting multiple overlapping domestic interiors. This cross-section was based on a dolls’ house belonging to Ravilious’s wife Tirzah Garwood (PB 119, Long Live Great Bardfield). On 5^th November 1940, devastatingly, the Morley refreshment room and its murals were destroyed in a direct bomb hit.

To further the tradition of architect-designed dolls houses established by Lutyens’s house for Queen Mary, Architectural Design magazine announced an international competition to design a contemporary dolls’ house. From 1981-83 over 200 architects from around the world entered designs and 70 sent fully-realised houses to the Bayswater offices of the magazine. The competition was won by British architects Michael Gold and Paul Wellard. Their house can be seen in the top right-hand column in the image above. 

The most famous dolls’ house in the UK is probably Queen Mary’s in Windsor Castle. The house and garden were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Among its many extraordinary details are the miniature books in its 200 volume library. One of these was Vita-Sackville West’s, A Note of Explanation (apparently a precursor to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando); it was written exclusively for the miniature library, and was finally published as a human-scale book in 2018.

With the opening of the V&A’s revamped Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, now called the Young V&A, our minds turned to the incredible dolls' houses in their collection.

Much like the original ‘baby houses’ from the Netherlands and Germany in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, early dolls’ houses were primarily used to train wealthy young girls in household management. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that they were considered as toys. Above we can get a glimpse of one in Philip Burne-Jones’s illustration from PB 73, The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler.

This week on the Post we are going dolls-house adjacent!

The Fakenham Gasworks Museum is "the only surviving town gas works in England and Wales" and is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument. The museum has displays of street lamps, water heaters, cookers, stoves, fires, domestic gas lighting and gas meters which are all bound to evoke memories and/or provide useful visual references for so many of Persephone Books' early- to mid-century titles.