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.