Top tips on how to furnish a wooden dolls house

A wooden dolls house is an object that can be very attractive and unique both inside and outside. You can save money on your wooden dolls house if you buy one with a good quality structure with no furniture, fixtures and decor then slowly add this yourself over time. This is a course of action which provides a source of entertainment and pride in itself, almost as enjoyable as playing with it once it’s finished.

How can I decorate a dolls house?

Inside the doll’s house might be very sparsely fitted out but you can easily change this. If you take a photo of some wallpaper that you like and then print it out at home on a smaller scale, you can then use it in miniature form by gluing it to the inner walls.

Offcuts of carpet, whilst handy, would be far too thick for your dolls house floor. However, an alternative to this could be offcuts of velvet fabric. If you source samples, these might well be large enough to “carpet” a whole room in your wooden dolls house.

As for bathroom floorcoverings imitating lino, why not find a picture of a lino pattern that you like and print it off on semi matt photo paper to give you that shiny, lino like effect in the bathroom. Something similar can be done to create a miniature tiled floor in a hallway or kitchen. You can create a geometric pattern on the computer and then fit it into a floor plan of a hallway or kitchen, printing it out on thick matt paper to trim to size and glue to your floor.

What lighting can you use in a dolls house?

If you think ahead with your décor and design of your dolls house, you can create this to the same standard as you would a real house. For example, you can install dolls house lighting and then tape down the cabling; this can then be wallpapered over so that it can’t be seen. You’d want to provide the same amount of lighting as you would in a real house – downlighters or pendants in the kitchen, wall lights in reception rooms and table lamps in bedrooms.

Decide on the period of décor and furniture

If you plan to make a good deal of the furniture yourself, keeping the style modern will make it a lot easier to fabricate the furniture. Period style furniture in itself demands swirls, dark antiqued stained wood, plush upholstery and brass handles. To create modern furniture, you can use cheap ply and mdf, cut out your shapes, glue the elements together and paint it white. A current interior design trend is to take older pieces with sculpted shapes and paint them in dark shades such as dark grey and dark blue. This could also be done with your dolls house furniture. This technique is used widely for wooden panelling in hallways, reception rooms and on kitchen cupboards so why not follow a chic interior design trend in your dolls house too?

Some very cheap furniture sets are self-assembly and the pieces are supplied on a sheet of board and then the pieces are punched out – this is a very economical way of buying dolls house furniture and gives the ability to paint and add individual touches to the furniture.

Using period furniture or reproduction antiques is more expensive to purchase, but there are some really beautiful pieces on the market. To make these yourself is fairly complicated but more satisfying than using more simple modern furniture and creating this will give a real sense of achievement. There are lots of online suppliers of dolls house furniture where you can buy items to give you the basic shapes of the furniture that can then be enhanced, tweaked and improved with your input. Adding fabric or paint or maybe even by altering the shapes of the pieces, trimming them with a chisel and other woodworking tools to give a more antique-like silhouette.

You can decorate the walls of your dolls house with mini paintings by finding pictures that you like and printing them out at a fraction of their real size. Creating ornate gold frames by fabricating the frame shapes out of wood or clay and then painting them will be fun and creative – a perfect rainy-day activity.

Ebay is a good place to look for dolls house furniture. An amazing array of products to enhance your dolls house can be purchased from websites such as, https://www.craft-products.com/, which sells furniture of good quality along with bricks and roof tiles for dolls houses to create wonderful, bespoke dolls mansions rather than ordinary houses. They sell antique style furniture, crockery and all the details you’d need to create a wonderful, fully furnished house.

Spain has a really strong heritage for furnishing miniature homes so foreign holidays will give you the opportunity to search out some alternative suppliers and interesting styles of dolls house furniture. La Laguna in Tenerife, for example, has a really excellent shop that has existed for many years and is a real treasure trove of beautifully made dolls house furniture.