Queen Mary's Dolls' House
Queen Mary's Dolls' House is a 1:12 scale miniature house designed by Edwin Lutyens (not built for play) from the 1920s and can be viewed at Windsor Castle .
Queen Mary , the wife of King George V , bore the name of the property, but the idea came from her cousin, Princess Marie Louise . On the occasion of the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1921, this led the leading architect Sir Edwin Lutyens to design the model of a “contemporary” luxury villa. Princess Marie Louise also managed to attract leading artists and artisans to the project. The "gift of the British people to their Queen" was intended to showcase the best and most modern of British goods and furnishings of the era. For example, the garage shows model versions of British car brands such as Daimler and Rolls-Royce, Vauxhall , Sunbeam and Lanchester . The miniaturized products were either provided by the companies concerned themselves or by professional model builders, for example the company Twining Models from Northampton . The approximately one meter high model house was shown at the British Empire Exhibition 1924/5 and is currently on display in Windsor Castle . The extraordinary level of detail of the model is remarkable - even the lifts and the flushing of the toilet facilities work. Well-known writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote special texts for the books in the miniature house, and well-known painters provided corresponding images. It is noticeable that the classicist building is stylistically not assigned to the modern age , but to the Belle Époque before 1914, and thus documents the conservative taste of the British upper class that dominated well into the interwar period.
literature
- John Martin Robinson: Queen Mary's Dolls' House - Official Guidebook , Royal Collection Publications, 2006