Sunday 19 February 2017

Step by step: servant room

In my guided tour of Womble Hall I have now ascended to the attic. You come to the attic by the stairs from the front corridor. The stairs lead to the servant quarters.


 

This room goes all the way back to the first Victorian house in a book shelf. It was so simple that I didn't even write a separate post about it, but here is a picture from January 2008:


Not much left of it, except for the doll.

When I reconstructed the dollhouse in the cabinet, there was no space for a servant room. The servant had to stay in the hall, and all the temporary furniture was stored away.

But in Womble Hall I wanted to have servant quarters, and the most logical place would be in the attic. However, I also wanted a nursery, and eventually I decided I wanted a guest bedroom that also had to be in the attic.  It doesn't really make sense to have doors from a servant room into the nursery and particularly not to the guest bedroom, but that's the way it is. (This is the only feature of the house I am still dissatisfied with).

There weren't any important decisions to make for this room: no partitions, corridors, chimney breasts, not even a window, just two doors. I put in paper floors and added a couple of objects, as I did in all other rooms, just to make it look nice. I hang wallpaper on flat surfaces, which was very straightforward.  I didn't plan to have any ceiling decorations. In the picture of the first proper assembly, you can see the back wall:



I didn't do anything in this room for a very long time, definitely not until I had to insert the upper staircase and realised that before that I actually needed to finish the floor in the servant room, as well as the two doors that lead from it. It was a long story. But I was quite pleased with the result, particularly when I put more objects in.



Sometime around this point it struck me that it would be fun to have a tired servant sleeping in this bed. Have you tried putting a regular dollhouse doll into a bed? Let me tell you: it doesn't look natural. So I searched ebay for "sleeping doll". Most of returns were sleeping baby dolls, but there was a remarkable doll couple sleeping in each others arms, at an outrageous price. I consulted my Facebook groups and, can you imagine, someone replied that it was their handmade dolls, re-sold, yes, at an outrageous price. But I could order one at a reasonable price. It would be OOAK - which I think is a wonderful acronym (on case you don't know, One Of A Kind).

Here is my sleeping doll, custom-made by smallsorts. .


I think she is absolutely amazing. Of course normally she is covered by a blanket, but I wanted to show her as she is.

 

Eventually I added an Adam ceiling to this room as well. Among the objects, I made a night stand and a chest.

I like this room, but there is probably more I can do with it. 

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