The Best Dollhouse Furniture EVER

So I have this thing for dollhouses. I have since I was a kid. It’s probably powered by the same set of impulses that made me a writer: obsession with detail, a love for imagining other lives, and a frank and unrepentant lust for power.

You will feed a chicken an entire stick of butter.   JUST BECAUSE I SAID SO.

I’d spend hours in the basement with the dollhouse my mom made me, constructing and reconstructing a plausible household layout for an unseen family. Laying out and taking away the tiny plates and silverware, arranging magazines and champagne glasses and empty pill bottles on the coffee table so the living room looked credibly lived-in. It was like that creepy Ray Bradbury story where the futuristic house keeps on humming after the whole family drops dead. I had a bunch of different dolls, but I hardly ever used them. Because they were made of plastic and pipe cleaners and had painted-on hair and giant wooden beads for heads, and all of them spoiled the illusion.

Sit your asses down.

In the late 70s/early 80s, there lived a group of toy geniuses with a secret superpower: gazing directly into the hearts of weird and nerdy children like me. This coven of masterminds worked for Tomy, the company behind the MOST FANTASTIC DOLLHOUSE FURNITURE EVER TO EXIST. They called the furniture (and the rad dollhouse that went with it) Smaller Homes and Gardens, which paralleled the grownup Better Homes and Gardens and was incontestable proof that they got what kids like me were after: 1:16-scale replicas of the real thing, the more detailed the better.

Look at the kitchen Tomy made us. This was a gift, the likes of which have not been mass-produced since. First of all, every single one of the drawers and doors opened, because Tomy understood that nothing chaps a budding miniaturist’s ass more than a drawer front that’s just for show.

Next: tiny fake woodgrain countertops, remarkably similar to big fake woodgrain countertops.

This stovetop, complete with finely detailed burners and five miniscule control knobs, looks ready for a simmering pot of Hamburger Helper (or some celebratory Rice-A-Roni, if you brought home an A on that shoebox diorama):

Some heroic smartypants installed an ice maker in the refrigerator door, because the ice maker is the coolest part of any refrigerator. . .

. . .and inside the fridge is a thrilling little assemblage of drawers, compartments, and bins, all in a zippy retro robin’s-egg blue. My favorite is the egg holder. (Yes, I made tiny clay eggs that fit inside. What?)

There’s more, like the vents above the stovetop and the silver faucet that really pivots. But the star attraction here is the dishwasher, and I’m not just talking about the black-and-silver frontpiece that looks so much like my parents’ old dishwasher that I can practically smell the Cascade. I’m talking about this:

Baskets, people.

REMOVABLE baskets.

I loved this kitchen. It is literally what I assumed my adult kitchen would look like; to this day, I’m sometimes slightly disappointed that my cabinets are white beadboard and not sun-yellow plastic. Along with the rest of my dollhouse, the Tomy kitchen helped me piece together fictions and envision adulthood. And also it was comforting, because I knew that if my worst fear came to pass and I inhaled an experimental perfume that turned me into the Incredible Shrinking Woman like in that petrifying horror film disguised as a family comedy, I would live out my last days in 1:16-scale comfort before dwindling to the size of an atom and blipping out of existence.

Who else remembers when she WENT DOWN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL.

Did you have a dollhouse as a kid? What was your favorite piece of furniture? If you weren’t a dollhouse-having type, tell me about another toy that helped you practice for grownupland, and still gives you a little thrill when you pick it up today. (Links to old toy commercials with quaint FX and depressing gender messages are strongly encouraged.)