Sunday, February 2, 2020

The Queen Anne Cottage Fantasy Island Dollhouse



The Queen Anne Cottage
 Welcome to my bucket list dollhouse house! This is the house I have always wanted to make. Thanks to the new tech of laser available for dollhousing , and the perfect custom pieces created for it by Sharon from Heritage Laser I was able to create my vision.







The Queen Anne house is a real house located in Arcadia California. It was used in a TV show called “Fantasy Island “and the movie “Meet the Fockers.” The property that includes a Lagoon was also used in the original Tarzan movies.  The house real was built to be a guest house.
This is pic of the real house I found in a book years ago  and had saved.  


The dollhouse is happily living now in the corner of my dining room. We put casters on the bottom of the  cabinet, so it can turn around easily to access the back for decorating.
 So, this was the beginning. This was not the vintage kit ! I actually had purchased that kit and it was horrible!  It is crazy big and the composition wood is awful. I threw it all away. I was able to used a few pieces from the tower kit. But the actual design/ plan for the house was just from looking at pictures of the real house.
 The real house has a wrap around porch on both sides and I really love that but it just made the footprint of the house to big. As you can see I originally kept one porch on the right side .
However I ended up cutting that porch off after I even had done the foundation. It was just going to be to wide for the space I had to display it in the dining room.
The finished house is now 39 in wide On the display board.

 The foundation of this house is much higher than I normally do. The real house has a high foundation so I went with it. The wood is 2 1/2 inches high. This meant that I was going to need a ton of bricks made to do the entire foundation.
 I cut all the egg carton lids I had saved. They were not enough, so I ended up buying egg cartons on eBay.
 I had them painted and drying all over my bed. I actually only have a small sandwich bag of them left from all of this .


 Now for the laser !
 Trays and trays and trays, three coats of paint and sanding in between. At least the wall pieces only needed painted on one side.




The tower! The tower was quite a challenge. I did use a few pieces from the original kit but the kit tower was not tall enough, and did not get smaller as it went up like the real house tower. I also wanted to add a spiral staircase to it. 



 I made red geraniums for two days for these planters.  I got the idea for having the planters from the  Fockers movie.




 The very top roof piece ended up being from a small wood bird house I got at a craft store.



Let’s take a look inside 





 This floor is actually a piece of cork that I brushed with paint. It was from an older  wallpaper border.














 This floor is a print of an authentic Cuban tile.


Back out front for a few more details 









So hope you enjoy seeing this house. I can’t wait to start decorating !