My Hobby
Each week on Library Day in kindergarten, I would ask the librarian if there were any new books on dollhouses. There rarely were new books on the subject, but I remember going back to the same book time and again to admire the most incredible dollhouses between its pages. My interest was not in the dolls, or playing house. It was in the architecture. There was one house in particular….a white stucco house with curved railings, weird windows, and a flat roof, that I was in complete awe of. It was unlike any house I had ever seen in my traditional suburban cul-de -sac in central New Jersey, and it was amazing. I didn’t know it at the time, but later I would learn that it was an art deco house, probably built in the 1930’s. I remember it looking something like this:
I found this on Pinterest…. 1936 Dolls house in the Bethnal Green Museum
Photo by diepuppenstubensammlerin on flickr
· · · Foto: Jean Latham. Dolls houses. London 1969
Or, if it were a real house, it may have looked something like this:
The 1938 Bohn House. Image: Dick Clark + Associates (found on https://austin.towers.net/a-field-guide-to-austins-art-deco-and-moderne-architecture/)
When I was very young, I remember my father, an engineer, teaching me how to use his scale ruler and gridded paper to draw things to scale. I would design floor plans, and he would critique them when I finished. “Well, maybe the laundry should be closer to the kitchen” (it was the 70s) or “Make sure the living room is big enough for a fireplace and a big sofa”. I listened to his advice. I wish I could find some of those floor plans. I wonder if they were any good. Maybe they were brilliant, imagine that.
One of my earliest memories is from when I was about 4 years old, in the basement of my childhood home with my very best friend Annie, keeping my mother company while she was refurbishing the dollhouse my parents had found years earlier (before I was born) in the barn of their previous home. When I can dig up a photograph of it, I will post it here. My mother worked so hard on that house, cleaning it, wallpapering it, painting it, making curtains for it. I loved her for doing this for me. Of course she didn’t know it at the time, - I was only 4 - but I do wonder if she ever realized just how much that dollhouse meant to me, a future architect. I wonder if she ever had any idea that this dream of mine to be an architect was even possible. I wonder if I knew it yet, at age 4, that this was what I would end up wanting more than anything else. And then I can’t help but think about the opportunities I have had versus the ones she had, and with deepest of gratitude, my heart breaks for my mother a little each time.
I spent endless hours on the dollhouse. I would go to the local hobby shop and get miniatures for the house….furniture kits, miniature pots and pans, miniature everything. I remember saving my money for weeks if not months and buying a greenhouse for it. It was the start of a life-long love of design and architecture. I get a bit misty when I think of it, in fact. What a profound effect something like a dollhouse could have had on a little girl.
As proof of my earliest passion, here is an essay I wrote for my 4th grade class about my hobby. I found it when I was cleaning out my mother’s home some years ago. I was floored by the first line. My hobby was architecture?! Who knew? Not me! My favorite line is where I write that I need to build an addition because I had too much stuff to fit into the existing home. I personally think that is very logical thinking for an architect. As for the furniture my aunt gave me, sadly it was lost in a move several years ago. Please pardon the misspellings, I was 10. (I still managed to get an A :))
I didn’t ever throw the dollhouse away. But I did sell it along with all the furniture, accessories and the greenhouse to a family who had a little girl that I hope cherished it as much as I did. Maybe it’s true that you can’t drag every sentimental piece of your history around with you your entire life, but every now and then my heart says about certain things, “why did I let that go”? Life is full of little moments of like that. We wouldn’t be human without them.