Sarah's Dollshouse

The kitchen is the heart of the home. The Tudor kitchen was no exception.

It was noisy and often filled with smoke and smells. There would have been many people working in the kitchen from small children turning the spit over the fire up the hierarchy to the head cook who oversaw the running of the kitchen.

I wanted to see an authentically recreated tudor kitchen so I visited Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincs and these are some of the resulting pictures.

Tudor Cottage kitchen

The existing dollshouse kitchen at Tudor Cottage is very uninspiring but I do have some ideas for it. This picture shows it empty and a little bare but after a visit to Gainsborough Old Hall and a trip around their kitchens there I came back brimming with pictures and ideas.

The joy of dolls houses is that you can take something large and shrink it down until it fits in the corner of your living room!

The Fireplace

The most important element of the kitchen was the grand fireplace. The plan for the dolls house fireplace kind of evolved based on a number of real tudor kitchens, including those in Stratford upon Avon as well as the grand kitchen at Gainsborough Hall. Unfortunately I do not have the grand scale to work with or the space to do these justice, so I had to reduce my scheme a little.

Instead of having a number of ovens as a large tudor kitchen would, I incorporated the fireplace, the bread oven and the salt oven in one piece. The sketches I did on the wall of the kitchen can be seen in the picture on the right. This was to get an idea of the scale and measurements that would be required.

The fireplace was built from a card skeleton which I glued together with craft adhesive and I used internal wooden batons to give the joints strength. It was then covered with Polyfilla and painted with a paint containing fine sand to give it a slightly gritty texture. The inside of the two ovens and the inglenook where then covered with bricks.

The bricks were made by scribbling coloured pencils over red sandpaper which was then cut into blocks and glues into the recesses. Once they were fixed I used dark pencils to add 'fire marks' where soot would have gathered in a real fireplace. Access some more pics of the building methods used to make the fireplace here...

The floor

I wanted a decent floor for my Tudor cook to work on. Some of the examples of real kitchens I looked at encorporated bricks and/or teracotta tiles. I searched around and settled on some 1 inche square tiles from the Dolls House Store in Earls Barton. These were laid onto thick card so that I can remove them whenever I need access.

The walls

The beams on the walls of the dollshouse kitchen are carved balsa wood which I shaped with a scapel and then waxed to give them colour. I think it is a very successful element of the kitchen.

The contents

The contents of the kitchen is my favourite part.

This is a picture of the kitchen pretty much finished with a laden table and a floor strewn with straw!

I bought the bowls from a small dollshouse shop in Ludlow and I love them. The eggs where another ebay purchase.

I picked up the cabbage and cauliflower at Miniatura in Birmingham in 2006 and I absolutely love them - they are so realistic!

Baskets of apples and pears that would not look out of place in my own kitchen - another Miniatura find!

Rubbarb that looks good enough to eat - and yes you guessed it, Minitura! It amazes me the level of detail that people are able to achieve on such a tiny scale.