When I was little, I wanted a dollhouse in the bookshelf. I think it was because of the Dollhouse Place. There, they had glass-fronted display cases filled with little dollhouse dioramas. Sofas and chairs, a woman in a kitchen, a man in a bathtub— room after room of people. It was like looking into a glass-fronted apartment house, only one did not have to be afraid of one’s inclination to stare.

In this photograph you will see, on the shelves, the Fisher Price dollhouse. It needs to come off the shelves to be played with. The house opens wide, the garage door opens and closes, and the doorbell rings. To the right of the house is a whole basket full of accessories— a couple of bathroom sets, a few dozen people, six dogs, a knight, king and squire (which are, technically, people), some living room sets, a complete kitchen, a staircase, a handful of beds, some dining tables and chairs, and five cars. Iris used to play with that house a lot. Sadly, my photoblog entries are not indexed for dollhouses, or I could give at least one example. Currently, the accessories for it— especially the cars— are Akiva’s favorite bathtub toys. The Fisher Price houseboat and dinghy live in the bathroom.

In the red storage container to the right of the brown basket are the Creative Playthings wooden dollhouse accessories. In this scene, the papa and the boy are living in the house on the left, in front of Akiva; the mama and the girl are living in the house on the right, in front of Iris. This is my solution to dollhouse on a shelf, and I think it works quite well. There is a connecting door between the two houses and doors to go out the back and sides, but do not let these doors confuse you into thinking that the two apparently linked houses are one house. They are, as the rooms on the selves in the Dollhouse Place, separate apartments.