Dollhouse Appreciation Thread

Princess Alice

I always loved playing with dollhouses as a kid. I played with my own, I played with my sister's (she had a few)...

Like, you get to have your own little family and control their entire lives, at least as long as they're in their house. And you get to move around the furniture and arrange the house just the way you'd want it if you lived there...it's so much fun!

I want to build one now...

Sredni Vashtar

My grandparents have a really interesting one which I always liked.

Crystal

In retrospect, I am mildly surprised I never got around to making this. Anyway I read part of a book on dollhouses I checked out from the library, which was nice. I also bought a different one last time I went to Half-Price Books, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

glennmagusharvey

Is there a virtual dollhouse game?

Other than The Sims, that is.

Princess Alice

The Sims was literally called "Project Dollhouse" during development because that was the experience Will Wright aimed to replicate, so I'm not sure why you would exclude that...

glennmagusharvey

Well I guess this goes back to my "interior design simulator" thing that I mentioned earlier.  Was looking for something that actually let me see the interiors of buildings from an occupant's perspective, and move around in them, and arrange furniture and decor as I please within them.

But that's neat trivia.  I didn't know that.

Crystal

Presumably because it's just not to his taste, which I can get. It's definitely not mine.

Anyway, that's pretty cool to learn.

glennmagusharvey

Y'know I should have followed the puzzle-solver's adages and just gone and Google'd it.
http://freshome.com/10-best-free-online-virtual-room-programs-and-tools/

Princess Alice

The story behind The Sims: Will Wright lost his home in the 1991 Oakland firestorm. In the process of rebuilding it, he came up with the idea for a game revolving around designing and furnishing houses--basically the "interior design simulator" you've been asking for. The people in the game were originally just there as critics, to evaluate the houses.

Then Wright realized that there was a lot of potential fun to be gained from controlling the characters directly, and "Dollhouse" became The Sims.

So it actually is a lot of fun to just pull up the game and build and furnish buildings without moving anybody in, in part because that was the concept it was originally built around. And hey, if you do that, you can always upload your buildings to the internet for people to download and play themselves! :P

glennmagusharvey

I didn't know that.  That's actually pretty neat.

In the meantime though:

This is me making as multifunction as possible a dorm room out of a 10' x 10' room with the door and windows placed thus, and using the rather limited selection of furnishings that the site provides.  It may seem a little cluttered or claustrophobia-inducing, but then so are real-life dorm rooms, especially for people who try to do lots of things with them.  And I've always liked the idea of using furniture as walls to subdivide a space, so that was a design choice I purposely explored here.

So we have a bed, we have two shelves that in total offer ample shelf space, one armoire, one set of dresser drawers, one desk, and at least one chair.  Also, the optional items are two curtains (for the windows), one wastebasket, one microwave, one mini-fridge, one random wall painting, one desk lamp, two extra chairs, a television, and a little side table.  I couldn't find a normal-height folding table or a sufficiently small two-seater sofa.

At an earlier point in time, I had the bed turned 90 degrees but against the same corner, and then the door was reduced to being just two feet wide, and a generic bookcase was placed at the foot of the bed.  I switched it around because that was actually a bunk bed (back when I was wondering whether it was possible to fit two people's worth of basic furnishings in one room of this size), and also I didn't yet discover whether I could free-place a curtain on the generic bookcase itself (which is open-air both sides).  (I still don't know actually but I think I can?)

But so the room as of now has basic sleeping and desk-use functions, as well as food storage and prep (microwave and mini-fridge), and a little entertainment/guest-entertaining area whose contents could be changed out to do other things -- remove the two chairs and fold up the table, and you have a place for playing floor games.  At another point in time I actually considered putting a kitchen counter in there to serve as a workshop space (there's no actual workbench that I could pick, I think).  And I would have gotten prettier curtains but nothing else matched this size of window.  And I would have uploaded more customizations, such as custom art to frame on the walls, if I could.

For more perspectives: http://s195.photobucket.com/user/Glenn_Magus_Harvey/library/interior design?sort=3&page=1

Here's the site for making your own designs: http://www.homestyler.com/designer

Tre

Arhaus

In the middle of arstreet

Lunate

The other day I learned about Queen Mary's dollhouse:



Also >not using 3D modeling software

Sredni Vashtar

^ Wow.

glennmagusharvey

Highly-detailed miniatures are really awesome.

Crystal

I love those with a passion. I remember talking to someone on Reddit years ago that made a highly-detailed miniature something for a class project (like IIRC Junior- or Senior-level stuff?). That was neat, should dig up the post one of these days, maybe.