A rainy Saturday and my dining room table is still covered in dolls house furniture so today seems like a good time to start photographing it.

The furniture, if you missed my previous post, belongs to Naomi. She started collecting dolls houses and dolls house furniture more than ten years ago. Currently the dolls houses are packed away as we are both getting ready for the day when we sell our homes. However, she dug out a box of furniture so that I could photograph it for the blog and we could see how it would look in the Triang 61 house. We apologise if it looks a bit dusty. We’re looking forward to the time when we can spend time together cleaning it all up and arranging it in the houses where it belongs.

I decided to start by sorting the furniture by brand, dealing with the marked brands first and any others that we had already positively identified. After that I’ll look at the unbranded ones and those marked “Made in Hong Kong”. By that time I expect we’ll have learned more about other manufacturers.

I also hope that we will be able to date the furniture at least to the correct decade.

1:16 Scale Furniture

Triang

Triang did produce some furniture for its own dolls houses. Between the World Wars they made wooden furniture, In the 1960s they made furniture from metal and moulded plastic very much in the style that was becoming popular at the time. It was marketed under the name “Spot-On”.

Lee Higgins at “Shed on the Pond” has written an excellent article about Triang furniture from this era.

Naomi has the wing chairs and sideboard from this collection.

Plasco

Plasco was an American company making doll furniture in hard plastic during the nineteen fifties and sixties. The furniture is marked with a toy soldier carrying a drum. Inside the drum is  the inscription “A Plasco Toy” and outside “Made in USA”.

Here is a bed and chest of drawers made by Plasco. I do love the detail the makers used to put in to their products.

 

Another fellow blogger, Martha Rubell has some fine examples of Plasco furniture on her blog.

Ideal

Ideal made a line of furniture called “Petite Princess” between 1964-68 and from 1965 a more basic line called “Princes Patti”. Having looked at a few photos online and read a bit about the Petite Princess Fantasy house I don’t think the two kitchen pieces Naomi has come from that line. They are made of hard plastic but one piece still has a cardboard back with the Ideal Toy & Novelty Company logo on it. If these were lost it would be difficult to identify the furniture unless you found a similar photo which luckily I did.

Ideal made two kitchen sets in the 1950s, a regular one and a Deluxe Kitchen. The difference was that the Deluxe had opening doors and moveable taps. These pieces would be from the regular set.

This table and chairs are also marked Ideal. The logo was so tiny I could barely read it. They look  very similar to a set made by Renwal.

Little Things

The person who sold Naomi this lovely English pram told her it was Barton which turns out to be correct. It is from the “Caroline’s Home” line.

Let’s see some of the  furniture inside the dolls house shall we?

As I said the 61 is an odd house and it is not easy to photograph the interiors without good lighting. I decided for these photos to make downstairs a kitchen/dining area and upstairs bedroom/ sitting room . Here you can see the Triang chairs and sideboard in the upstairs area while to the left is the Plasco bed and chest of drawers. The only way I could find to photograph the bed was through the window.

Downstairs Mother is busy admiring her Ideal kitchen.

In the sun porch Father is supposed to be watching the baby but I think he might have fallen asleep. We don’t know if the little crochet dog is handmade or professional but he’s very well done.

In Part Two we will look at furniture from Kleeware, Renwal and Marx