Wooden Dollhouses

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With all of today's technology, it's great to see a "low-tech" toy such as wooden dollhouse ranking so high on the Christmas bestseller list. Wooden dollhouses are the perfect interactional toys for young girls. Wooden dollhouses will help to develop your girl's coordination and imagination.

There are many companies that make wooden dollhouses in this world, and they range from cheapo junk to fancy expenisive extravagent dolllhouses. The ones most people want are somewher in-between. In our research, we have found that Amazon.com features the most popular best-sellling dollhouses that are affordable and highly rated. Click through on the banner to the right and you can read for yourself the various reviews of best-selling wooden dollhouses.

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 wooden doll houses are from the Sixteenth Century. These baby or cabinet houses showed idealized interiors complete with extremely detailed furnishings and accessories (mostly hand made).

Today's doll 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 such as the Tate house, with more realistic exteriors, became evident in Europe.

 

The Evolution of Wooden Dollhouses

The early European wooden dollhouses were each unique, constructed on a custom basis by individual craftsmen. 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. 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 TynieToy Company of Providence, Rhode Island, 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 World War II, wooden dollhouses became mass produced in factories on a much larger scale with less detailed craftsmanship than ever before. By the 1950s, 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 World War II to own a wooden dollhouse. The term dollhouse is common in the United States and Canada. In UK usage, dolls' house or dollshouse is usual.

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