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Huyze Herkert, morning room: the floor and the fireplace

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Victorians installed wall-to-wall carpeting in almost all their rooms. What a filthy affair that must have been! Burning coal fireplaces, streets full of dirt and ash, … and no vacuum cleaner! Eastlake thought this was an objectionable fashion. He recommended a parquetry border projecting two or three feet from the wall all around with a carpet in between. Here are some examples he gives: Exquisite! But far too difficult for a first attempt at making a parquet floor in miniature. At 23.8 by 26.9 cm my morning room is a small space, so I went for something much simpler: an oak veneer strip floor with a border consisting of two narrow walnut veneer strips. I kept the pattern in the middle section simple as I'm stitching a rug that will cover this part almost completely. I started by making a template from 1mm thick MDF and cut strips from 15mm wide oak edge banding that I ironed on the MDF. The border is cut from a sheet of walnut veneer and glued on. Each walnut strip is 2...
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The background and lay-out of Huyze Herkert

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Because the furniture and accessories I already owned were Victorian in style, I decided to situate Huyze Herkert in that period. I love history, I love interior design, and above all, I've always loved literature from that era. So I started reading about the Victorian era and digging into the habits, the furniture styles, the architecture et cetera. The Herkerts, a British upper-class family, live most of the time at their country estate, but Huyze Herkert is their London home, where they spend The London Season. The time in which I place their story is 1890. At that time, there was (limited) running water in London, which gives me more options for the kitchen and bathroom, but there was no electricity yet (I love candles). In the nineteenth century, segregation of each function of the house became of high importance. The layout of the house is as follows: This immediately illustrates why I still find the house too small: there is no basement, so the kitchen has to be placed...
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An introduction to Huyze Herkert

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I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but when I was fairly young (around 7 maybe?), my parents bought me a dollhouse. A dark stained, massive wooden one. A sturdy one. One with two floors. One that they didn't think was big enough, because they asked my grandfather's brother to add an extra floor at the bottom. The house was filled with furniture, accessories and crockery that came from my grandmother's old dollhouse. And with new bits and pieces of course. My grandparents traveled extensively, and they often brought back items from their travels for the dollhouse. Not all the furniture was the same scale. And the house was inhabited by a mix of Sylvanian Families animals and dolls. After all it was an item to play with. A big Playmobil house followed, and some smaller Sylvanian Families ones. Besides drawing, clay modeling, and painting (and gymnastics, lots of gymnastics), I mainly played with dollhouses as a child. But then I grew up, and the dollhouses ended up in ...
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