How to Design Dollhouses
While store-bought dollhouses and dollhouse building kits or patterns may be a fast way to find a home for your miniature characters and their belongings, the best way to customize your tiny world is to design your own dollhouse. When designing your own dollhouse, consider both matters of form and function. This way, you can create a home that's not only well-planned structurally but provides for all the "needs" of its tiny inhabitants.
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Instructions
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Decide what rooms you want. Based on "storytelling" aspects of your dollhouse (such as what historical and geographical area it's set in) and how wealthy the "owners" of your house are meant to be, figure out how many rooms your house will have and what types of room they'll be. Make a list on paper to help keep track.
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Decide on and organize the layout of the rooms. Determine how large the rooms should be in relation to one another, then pin down exact dimensions for the rooms (remember to use the standard doll house scale of 12:1, or 6:1 if you are building a house for larger dolls, such as Barbie dolls). If your doll house will have multiple floors, decide also which rooms will be on which floors.
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3
Adjust the sizes and shapes of the rooms in order to fit them into a floor plan. Make sure that first and second stories are the same shape and that the outer edges of the rooms form a rectangle or whatever shape you want for the outside of the house.
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Design the external structure of the house. Decide where you want to place windows and doors as well as decorative features like trim.
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Plan a means to access the dollhouse. Typically, this will either be in the form of the front panel of the house with a hinge, or dividing the entire house into two hinged sections.
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Sketch your design. Use a ruler and/or graph paper in order to be able to make an accurate scale drawing that can be translated into plans.
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Make a list of miniatures and accessories you want to fill your house with. Organize your list by room, as this will help you remember everything you need. Making a complete list will help you start to collect pieces while the dollhouse is being built.
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