For the past decade, Maria Fowler has been selling intricate, handmade dollhouses out of her Mount Pleasant Road shop, where she stocks thousands of accessories and over a dozen miniature structures—including a $59,000, 20-room faux-Victorian mansion with stained-glass windows and electrical wiring. While kids are the mainstay of her business, some customers are a bit older. We spoke with Fowler about life in a little world.
Why are adults interested in buying dollhouses?
Because you get to control everything. Most of us can’t afford to have different houses, do them up all the time and make them as grand as we want. A lot of our adult collectors even have stories behind their dollhouses—they have this whole little world they’ve created. They make up a history for the families who live there, and why things are a certain way and what a particular painting means.
Do you get specific requests?
Other stores have had requests for the Taj Mahal or the White House. But we’ve built at least half a dozen people’s house or cottage reproductions. Or they bring me a photo of a piece of furniture to reproduce in miniature form. We have a reproduction of a San Francisco house with an apartment upstairs. It looks aged—the
wallpaper is peeled, the floor is slanted, but it’s all done on purpose.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
A dollhouse business is not really a business. If we ran this for a profit we’d have closed a long time ago. Successful, efficient businesses do about four to eight inventory turns a year. If we turn over half of our inventory this year I’d be surprised. You really have to be a lover of dollhouses to do this.
