My Mind full of Miniatures

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...

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 ...