Wooden Dollhouses
There are few toys that have endured longer than wooden dollhouses. You have to use the term "toy" loosely, because the early dolhouses were more for adults than children. Through the centuries, however, wooden dollhouses have become a favorite among mothers and daughters in various versions.
These days, wooden dollhouses are available in many styles and price ranges. We have found that a site such as Amazon.com is the perfect place to compare and research various wooden doll houses as there is such a great selection - whether you're looking for a medium-sized or a large wooden dollhouse. Just as importantly, there are many users reviews to help you to decide which is the ideal wooden doll house for you.
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.
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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 term dollhouse is common in the United States and Canada. In UK usage, dolls' house or dollshouse is usual.
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).
Wooden Dollhouses: The Evolution of the Wooden Dollhouse
The early European wooden dollhouses were each unique, constructed on a custom basis by individual craftsmen. 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 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.
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.