A palace in miniature

There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia.

There’s nothing like a really good wallow in nostalgia. And if it can be arranged so that the nostalgia is for a time that never was, that’s even better. So it is hardly surprising that when, after the horrors of the first world war, Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, approached Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a dolls’ house for Queen Mary, they settled stylistically on creating a house firmly rooted in that semi- mythical long Edwardian pre-war summer, when God was clearly an Englishman, his home was his (miniature) castle, and his servants were, decently, not only omnipresent but also invisible. It is this invisibility, ultimately, that makes dolls’ houses so wonderful: they become a blank slate, a world empty of mess, of history, of emotion, of trauma.

The idea of a dolls’ house for a grown woman was odd, but Lutyens was no stranger to eccentricity. On visiting Simla in 1912, he had commented:

If one was told that the monkeys had built it all, one could only say, ‘What wonderful monkeys — and they must be shot, in case they do it again.’

Similarly, Queen Mary’s dolls’ house is a magical world, but one would not like it done again, created as it was out of a mindset of obsequiousness and hierarchy of birth over merit that has, thankfully, all but passed away. Not, of course, that one would know any of this from Lucinda Lambton’s delightful romp around the miniature world at Windsor, published as it is by the Royal Collections.

As the National Trust has found out in their full-sized properties, the rooms that people like most are not the great reception rooms, the stately-home stage-sets, but the ‘real’, the places which we can in our imaginations, more or less, transport to our own lives: the bathrooms, the kitchen, the pantry.