Collecting tiny wooden dollhouse furniture revolves around creating real looking room setting in small scale versions. An understanding of this reduction in size is necessary in order to achieve the desired realism. In a dolls house, scale is the relationship in size between the real life house and the tiny model. A change of scale can also change the impression that an object conveys. For example, a wood couch gives us the feeling of massive weight, a feeling entirely lost in the dolls house furniture model. But the reproduction rewards us with something else by showing us the entire mechanism at a single glance, which helps us to understand how the elemental parts relate to one another.

In the same way, when we experience a full size house room by room, and only after we’ve assembled all these “pieces” in our mind do we develop a feeling about the house as a whole. But a dollhouse can be taken in at one glance, giving us a much more instantaneous impression of the period, the feel of the house, and the “lifestyle” of the dolls involved. Size and scale is a concept of great interest to many collectors, whether you are young or old. The question thus raised is how much importance to place on exactness of scale. In some wood doll houses you can skip this consideration for the most part. The relevancy really boils down to the distinction between what are miniatures and what are toys. When children play with their dollhouses, their furnishings are wooden toys. The success of a child’s dollhouse is judged by the pleasure it gives the child, and as such the discussion of scale has little significance. Miniature furnishings, on the other hand, are tiny, scale models, so their success is determined by how closely they copy the original. This is when sizing is all important.

Several of the early dollhouses that were constructed and furnished for children took only rough notice of scale. These dollhouses were intended to educate young girls, through play, how to run a appropriate household. So as long as the dollhouse and its contents were a reasonable facsimile of a home, it served its function. Most of these early wooden dollhouse furniture were architecturally out of proportion. They were stylized designs invented by the dollhouse kit builders, who were usually the dads or grandparents of young girls. These houses contained ceilings that were quite high in relation to the room dimensions in order to make the houses more reachable to children.

The objective of some of the wooden doll house furnishings today, as well as many doll house accessories, is to achieve a kind of realism that duplicates large scale originals. Everything must shrink to the same size for the room to look realistic. Anything out of scale will look out of place. Take a wood chair and place it in a miniature room setting and it will look out of place as a in a life size setting. The important thing about scale isn’t so much what the scale is but that everything exists in the same scale.

If it makes you happy to collect your own wooden dollhouse furniture and miniatures in a scale smaller or larger than one inch to one foot, then by all means do so. There are miniatures available in a every size imaginable with the tiniest of hair brush and bathroom accessories. For children, however, picking up these small pieces can be as hard as it is for the older adult, but they are just so darn cute who could resist. It isn’t necessary to decide at the outset just how far you want to go in assembling your dollhouse collection. Start at a level comfortable to your pocketbook, and upgrade your collection as your means allow and your growing appreciation dictates.