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I’m not sure where the desire came from, but I can clearly remember asking for a doll’s house; I must have been aged under ten, as I was still in primary school. So I was gifted a large white painted plywood box. With an ‘+’ in the middle that formed four rooms. It was perfect. Just what I needed to put all my pocket money, plastic cutlery and little copper-coloured pots and pans in.
I think it was a form of escapism and a way of acting out the ‘grown-up’ world – with Dyna Girl and Action Man being ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. He came home from work and Dyna Girl was in the kitchen berating the kids (Pippa doll – she was shorter). Me and my little friends acted out scenarios we would never have dared say to a grown-up in “real life”: ‘Do your homework!’ ‘No!’ Think a miniature plastic version of The Real Housewives of Atlanta mixed with Outnumbered. We played with brown-skinned dolls alongside cheaper, knock-off versions of Sindy dolls, and mixed homemade cardboard furniture with birthday presents and tiny silver cutlery bought from Walthamstow market.
Over the years, my love of the scaled-down world has evolved into the appreciation of professional miniatures, where one piece of handmade furniture can take days to make. I attend shows and exhibitions and have visited Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle, which took two years to complete and involved more than 1,500 top artists and craftsmen between 1921 and 1924.
I am completely self-taught, apart from the woodwork skills learned during my design degree. During lockdown 2021, I was at home for weeks at a time, and an idea that I’d been thinking about for some time finally began. I took a scalpel and small scraps of plywood and made a miniature house, 1:144 scale, based on Rihanna’s childhood home in Barbados. It was a bit crude, but once the local timber yard opened up (one person allowed in the shop at a time), I bought some more plywood and made a miniature 1970s kitchen unit.
Miniatures take effort for us to view; we have to lean in, bend down, even squint or use a magnifying glass to see all the details. Once we’re there, we might as well stay awhile and take in all the details we tend to ignore in ‘real life’. Everyday objects look more interesting and even more ‘human’ when they are artfully reduced to 1:12 scale and hand finished.
The very first recorded ‘miniature houses’ in the 17th century were metal and made for adults. Their purpose was to teach young women how to manage a home. They were also used to display a wealthy family’s small belongings. The doll’s houses of today are in two camps: children’s toys such as the plastic fantastic Barbie Dreamhouse, and the £50,000 über-lifelike mega creations by Mulvany & Rogers for adult collectors. I wonder what Barbie’s house will be like in the film that came out earlier this month. The Barbie Dreamhouse children’s toy looks so perfect... I’m sure, as with the doll’s houses we built as children, small items like empty matchboxes and broken ornaments end up in there to add a bit of interest.
All of my doll’s houses (I own four and would have more but have run out of space) have a miniature pot of Madam CJ Walker’s Hair Ointment somewhere in one of the rooms. In the late 19th century, she became the first Black female millionaire in America, having made her fortune from revolutionary Afro hair treatments. I like to bring my personal cultural elements into my work and also collaborate with surface designers who give me permission to scale down their patterns and use them as wallpaper or soft furnishings. Mashups of English-style Georgian three-seaters mix with colours from my travels around North Africa and my Ghanaian ancestry. My miniature Caribbean drinks cabinet, Art Deco dressing table, and 1830s-style armchair use African wax-print fabrics and Adinkra symbols; small collages incorporate images of influential women such as Josephine Baker and Maya Angelou.
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Grace Jones had bold white body paint applied to her by the artist Keith Haring in the 1980s. I’ve used these patterns on the surface of my 1930s-era dressing table. Anything is possible! I’m influenced by fashion trends, interior design, travelling, the ever-changing scenes in London, the history of art, textile and interior design... and I regularly visit flea markets to source unique vintage and small objects that can be used in a miniature room. Two trips to Paris were spent sourcing small boxes from these marché aux puce, and my purchases make lovely scaled-down tables. I do pop into charity shops from time to time; however, I think any good-quality small furniture gets snapped up before I get there. So I make 95% of it in my houses myself, using laser cutting and also by hand using a fretsaw.
I’d love for more people to start creating doll’s houses that are full of their families’ stories and miniature versions of precious items, and for them to be handed down the generations as heirlooms with a history. You don’t need to have a full-sized doll’s house in your home – sometimes space is an issue and there might be some little hands reaching in – but it’s easy to have a ‘room box’, or even line up a collection of miniature items on a shelf.
I would like to see more miniatures incorporated into public spaces and buildings – they can convey so many ideas at once. They don’t look down on us from a gallery wall; they invite us in. Even the priceless Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is welcoming and doesn’t intimidate.
I feature high-end fashion that uses embroidery, ruching, beading and bright fabric patterns (reduced down in Photoshop) in my miniatures. But I also use found objects, upcycled make-up compacts and broken diamanté jewellery. These details are intriguing and take us out of the everyday. Keep dreaming!
