An introduction to Huyze Herkert

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 the basement for years.

When my grandmother died six years ago, the idea arose to bring out her dollhouse objects and give them a place. To remember her and feel a lasting connection with her through our shared love of miniatures. I started by sorting the pieces by scale. Most are 1:24 scale, some are 1:12 scale, and some are somewhere in between.

I didn't want to use the original wooden dollhouse. Because of its size (where would I put it?) and because of a major annoyance I had as a child: it doesn't have any stairs. The 1:24 scale furniture went into a wall cabinet that belonged to my great-grandmother.

I know, it doesn’t have stairs either and it doesn’t look like much at the moment. But it wasn’t my main focus. I wanted a 1:12 scale dollhouse in a cabinet, with a glass front to keep dust out. Since there weren't many pieces of furniture in 1:12 scale, it didn't need many rooms (but it did need a staircase – of course!). Two floors seemed like enough.

Looking for additional furniture to complement what I already had, I went online. And I discovered a whole new world: there were stores; and blogs about dollhouses; and magazines; and tutorials. There were even dollhouse fairs – who would have thought?

You get it: I fell down the rabbit hole. Deep, very deep (well, I guess I might actually still be falling).

Only two floors? What was I thinking??? So this is how the dollhouse turned out (not all the walls are at the right place on this picture):

It is 100cm high, 98cm wide and 31cm deep and I still think it is way too small. Besides, I want more houses: a medieval castle, a 17^th century canal house, a Tudor country estate, an art nouveau villa, a midcentury modern bungalow, … The dreams! The plans!

But let’s start with this one: Huyze Herkert. ‘Huyze’ being old Dutch for ‘house of’. Herkert being the surname of my late grandmother.