Michael Walton offers a wonderful new spin on Ibsen's Doll's House theme. Working with fellow craftsman Pat Keenan, he will create a doll's house of your home, a perfect miniature, built to scale, with exquisite replicas of your interior accommodation, reproducing your rooms, furniture, fittings and fabrics - everything down to the tiny brushes on your bedroom dressing table.
Alternatively, at much less cost, they will build you a beautiful, if standard, doll's house.
A cabinet-maker by profession, Michael trained in antique furniture restoration with McDonnell Antiques, Dublin, where owner Ron McDonnell fulfilled a dream by building and furnishing Tara's Palace, a 20-room mansion in miniature, now on exhibition at Malahide Castle, Co Dublin. Michael became involved in making the miniature furniture, and was hooked. "It was the beginning of my miniature career," he says. Doll's house-maker Pat has restored and rewired the 80-year-old doll's house on permanent display in Bantry House, Co Cork.
Today, they make and supply doll's houses with Michael's furniture reproduced in 1:12 scale. His workshop in Crumlin is full of natural light for this precision work, his workbench tools comprising tiny chisels and wood planes, a jewellery vice, a fretsaw and bladed knife.
Customers can choose from a number of doll's house models designed in Georgian style, the hinged facade opening to reveal reception and bedrooms plus stairwell, with garden level and attic rooms. This basic plywood structure costs about £1,000, (cheaper still in DIY kit form). Alternatively, an individual facade and interior can be faithfully reproduced. "We would measure, take photographs, build to scale," says Pat Keenan. "To achieve a particular look, we can create a pebbledash or brick finish, while a Georgian exterior may have pillars and plaster work. The unfurnished replica will cost anything from £2,500 for a four-bed detached home, to £5,500 for a large period 10-room home."
"While the customised is obviously more expensive, we can work within a budget, working from plans if necessary and adapting to scale," says Michael.
Moving into the interior, there is lots of scope to suit individual needs. A thriving international miniature market means that Michael can source a bewildering array of tiny artefacts from delph to clocks, candlesticks to cots, bookcases to dining chairs.
"Alternatively you could have a Michael Walton room in which I would reproduce any or all pieces of your furniture exactly," he says. "I use reclaimed mahogany and oak chosen for its colour and fine grain, I make authentic joints, with boxwood and ebony for inlay. All my period furniture is waxed and French polished."
Such handiwork does not come cheap. He unwraps from tissue paper a Georgian mahogany desk on slim carved legs, its tiny tongue-and-groove drawers have brass handles and slide like satin, the desk top is covered in velum made by a local bookbinder, tooled in gold. This took 10 working days to make and costs £950. "Customised pieces can vary in price from £60 to £4,000," says Michael.
His company sources wallpaper, light fittings, kitchen and bedroom furniture, tiny quilts and pillows, glassware, curtain fabric and woven rugs, as well as period marble fireplaces, ceiling cornices, made in plaster or resin, silverware - in short, everything for the interior in miniature form. "We can reproduce anything," he says, "though it takes time". Allow a couple of months from order to completion.
"Lots of the people who contact me had a doll's house in their childhood and say they would like one for their children and grandchildren," says Michael Walton. "I think in some cases, it's an excuse to have one for themselves!"
Michael Walton Miniatures, 49 St Agnes Rd, Crumlin, Dublin 12, Tel 01-4555394. E-mail: dollshouseireland@eircom.net www.dollshouseireland.com
