Noel's drawing of the proposed Octagon miniature house

Thanks to one of your comments, dear readers, I combed our slide files and found a paltry handful of Octagon interiors–just glimpses of rooms under construction. The dearth of interior shots is a mystery, as we normally cataloged our work as we went. Obviously the puzzle of this house had us so entwined we forgot to shoot the finished interiors. Noel says it’s because the octagon shape demanded we keep most of the outer walls intact.

first floor interior

Interior access is mainly through smaller hinged window sections, too small to get a decent camera angle. Plus, the house was shipped directly to New York, so our Los Angeles photographer friend didn’t get a chance to shoot it. Besides the shots included here, you can see how it looks today, at The  East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society, including a small parlor interior glimpse by Googling “Octagon_East Hampton” or trying this link http://easthampton.patch.com/articles/holiday-house-tour-in-minature#photo-8508984

2nd floor plan, note center staircase that went from basement to the dome room.

Armed with my trusty new scanner, I was able to reproduce the floor plan to the left, as well as some construction shots that will give you an idea of how the puzzle of the house went together. We tackled it layer at a time, like a big wedding cake, starting with the basement. What you cannot see is the Boynton Square Pot Crusader Furnace Google it to see the original ad for it) Noel made–a replica of the full-size behemoth in the original Armor-Stiner house. It is a masterpiece, and evidence of our obsession with basements.

Octagon basement 1

The basement also contains a laundry room, a greenhouse (a room with above-ground windows), and an entirely inaccessible room, a corner of which can be seen through one window with the aid of a cleverly placed flashlight and dental mirror. The room is stacked with mass-produced miniatures we didn’t know what else to do with. Originally the storage room was illuminated by a single lightbulb, which must must have burned out years ago. If it hadn’t been the first floor we worked on, I doubt it would have been that detailed. But maybe.

Octagon second floor

While we papered, paneled and laid flooring in the first and second stories, our minds worked at decoding the mystery of the dome. Not only the actual construction of the dome, but how we would achieve something that looked like the original, intricately-patterned slate roof. We knew slate was out of the question, so we had to recreate that illusion with cedar shingles. Plus, there was the whole wood-paneled interior to make. When the time came we began with what I can only describe as seat-of-the-pants construction.

Kitchen

Dome ribs in place

While I went to work on what would be the interior horizontal beadboard paneling (1/4″ X 1/16″ fir I beveled on both edges), gluing miles of the side-by-side strips on sheets of newspaper, Noel started in on the interior support ribs–the beams that would give the dome its shape and stability. We had no idea if this would work, but knew it had to.

Once the beams were in place, we cut the sheets of beadboard to fit between them. Not trusting just the glued wooden joints to hold it all together, I glued a layer of muslin to the outside. By that time we could have rolled it down the street without damage.

Reinforcing dome structure

Dome interior

Noel got to slice the thousands of tiny fish-scale and diamond roof shingles on the Dremel scrollsaw. I got the job of gluing them all on, trying to emulate the precise, more-or-less floral patterns on the original house. As they do, often the rows went sideways a little–the courses falling out of alignment due to varying shingle widths, as well as applicator-error. Noel then had the job of going back with paints to fake the patterns where the shingles had gone astray, and create what we liked to call the illusion of reality.

Finished Dome

Maybe this is justification, but, I think if the shingling had been perfect, aligning to the millimeter, the house wouldn’t have been as successful. What we produced was the work of human hands and hand tools, and that something else–the muse of miniatures, some extra-terrestrial help from Orson Fowler–that made it all come together. The puzzle was not exactly solved, but juggled and carved into a believable structure.

The Carmer Octagon House, thanks to the Irvington Historical Society

Thanks to the frenzy of enthusiasm for Victorian architecture during the 1970s-80s, we had lots of reference materials, largely in the form of period architectural magazines, coming across the doorstep. Plus, our reputation as builders of miniature Victorians brought in clippings from people all across the country. In one envelope was the story of the 1859-60 Orson Fowler-designed octagon house, the Armour-Stiner House (now the Carmer Octagon), in Irvington, NY, built in 1859-60, then recently nominated for the National Register of Historic Places. It was, and is, basically, a spectacular dome, all decked out in ornate Victorian gingerbread, and a fish-scale slate roof. It was so picturesque, so unusual and over-the-top loony, that we knew immediately we had to build it. We also realized it would take a particular kind of customer to love such a house. As we cut and glued our way through our tower Victorians, the idea of the octagon simmered along. That simmering was fired up by the purchase of a Dover re-issue of The Octagon House: A Home for All, Orson Fowler’s paean to the 8-sided house.

The Octagon, 1982, Waikiki Beach, Ilwaco, WA

The octagon style has been referred to as the brain house, and rightfully so. Before he designed houses, Fowler practiced phrenology, the study of the skull’s bumps and contours to determine one’s character. While a brain-shaped, or round, house was not particularly practical, the modified octagon was. Fowler also championed women’s rights, suggesting the fairer sex throw off their corsets and follow a course of brisk exercise. To help this idea along he proposed an open, light-filled ballroom at the top of the house, where the presumably unfettered woman could jog and cavort in privacy or bad weather. He also put the all the home improvements in the basement or first floor as an aid to women, his theory being that once the wife made the beds upstairs, she could come down for the day “to pick berries for her husband’s lunch,” do the cooking, cleaning, laundry and dishes downstairs, thereby saving her multiple trips upstairs every day. One has to wonder at his notion of the only upstairs chore being to make the beds. And the berry picking? But his heart, I imagine, was in the right place. He also believed that square-cornered rooms harbored drafts and germs. I wondered what kind of furniture and carpets one put in pie-shaped rooms. Not to mention how we would do those thousands of tiny, fish-scale roof slates. Or a domed roof.

Noel designing the mini-Octagon

We had far more questions than answers about how to recreate such a structure in miniature, but were not deterred. I can’t remember exactly the sequence of events, but as the time approached for us to wind up #25, The Port Townsend House, I wrote to the next customer on the list to say her turn was coming up. It was another of those serendipitous moments when we broached, with trepidation, the idea of an octagon to her. Maybe we even sent her the initial sketch of the house. By then we were hooked, and had decided to build an octagon next, even if we had to search for a buyer. We waited for the mails to wend their way eastward. Then, I think the customer called. She couldn’t have been more enthusiastic—the octagon was a style she had studied and adored for years, to the point of wanting one in full-size. A woman after our own hearts, and the architect of another quirky adventure. In 1982 we commenced with the Octagon, house #26.

Model A Garage, 1981

When Allan Davis and Babs Raftery of Mr. Peepers mini-shop in Seattle asked us in 1981 to come up with a project for teaching our aging techniques, we had no idea of how much we didn’t know. They insisted that whatever we did, the students would love it, and to dive in. As that had been our basic M.O. for the past 7 years, we took the plunge, thinking our biggest problem was coming up with a building small enough to teach. Our idea came across the breakfast table as we were looking out the window at our full-size aging 1920s 2-car garage that tilted a bit to the north. It was single-walled and unfinished inside, shingled on the outside, with a composition roof full of dry-rot and moss. A stairway at the back lead up to a bare-bones apartment with a main room, a bath, and a kitchen under a shed-roof dormer. If we pared it down to a 1-car garage, and made it an exterior-only class (they could finish the inside at home on their own), it just might work.

We did a test run by adding a garage to our Megler Landing house. Our full-size garage had a dirt floor and driveway, but a wood floor and brick drive seemed the better way to go, design-wise, and besides, we had cases of brick tiles to use up. We opted to change the roof to wood shingles, along with the front wall over the door. To make the building more interesting, we decided on board-and-batten siding (vertical battens applied to the plywood walls), dressed up with some Carpenter Gothic inverted chevron and triangle trims, so simple Noel made them free-hand, practically with his eyes closed. We liked it so much we went to work on the class prototype—a slightly larger version that would give us room for the apartment, too. We called it the Model A because that was the only car small enough to fit through the doors.

Kitchen table summit

Once we were done, it was back to the kitchen table (the studio was too crowded with tools and the next big house), to break down the elements into teaching units, and make diagrams and instructions. By that time Ray Urh was into large-scale production of our mini-shingles—we’d never have finished prepping the class if we’d had to cut the students’ shingles ourselves. Then there was color–our prototype was green with gray accents, but, thinking maybe the students would want to choose their own colors, we suggested they think about it, and bring their own, or buy the paints at the miniature shop. While Noel built kits, I assembled elements, packed boxes, and practiced making chevrons so I could teach them, quickly finding out it was not so simple to cut 45% angles by hand with an Exacto knife. We didn’t have enough mitre boxes for the students, and that set-up took too much time anyway. Too late, we were committed.

Chevron diagram

I don’t know who decided we could teach this in a weekend (it must have been a 3-day) but that’s what we advertised for. All of a sudden we had 20 enrollees, and we didn’t even have a classroom. All we knew was that we needed a readily available water source for the very messy work we did, and a floor that paint and Bug Juice stain could be spilled on. No problem, Allan said, you build the kits, I’ll find the space.  Oh, and how about a slide show of your houses for one evening? He eventually convinced a restaurant near the store to let us use their back room, which was usually empty on weekends. He got it for free if we ordered lunch from their menu every day. Allan was even more excited because he could take the students for lunchtime drives around the parking lot in some of his antique cars.

Model A apartment

Finally, one September morning, there were 20 students from all over the country, awaiting our words and expertise. My mind has erased the emotions of that moment, other than the realization that we had no idea of what would come next. Each student had a box in front of them with the basic structure, diagrams, directions and all the supplies necessary—it was our idea that we would demo a process and they would set to work on their own, calling upon us as needed. We quickly found we had to teach, step-by-step, how to do what we did—the students were paralyzed with the fear of making a mistake. A very sweet woman from Los Angeles who showed up in a pastel cashmere suit smiled at my suggestion she might ruin it. She was somehow protected by mysterious forces that never let her spill or splatter a drop. The nearest water source was the Ladies Room, whose drains we clogged with paint. We modified the swirly-patterned rugs forever. Lunch plates and ashtrays cluttered the work tables. The people who strayed from our color choices hated them by day two. More than one person cried over the chevrons, and students took their projects back to their hotel rooms at night to shingle and brick, showing up bleary-eyed in the morning. Of course no one finished the project, but the amazing thing was they all thought it was fun, many to return as future students. And they loved the slide show, and touring around in Allan’s cars. When we came up for air, Noel and I went home jazzed with their enthusiasm. Jazzed enough to return for another 30 years of teaching.

Addendum:  Articles in the September and November 1981 issues of Nutshell News–the first two in my long-running series of how-to aging techniques–give more information on the Model A. You’ll notice some differences in the origins of the building, but if you ask me which is right, I’ll say both.

Port Townsend House, 1981

The Port Townsend, miniature house # 25, was the second of the major houses we built in 1981. It was named for a Victorian seaport on the Quimper Peninsula in Washington State, a town whose architecture deeply influenced our own Victorian period. The Port Townsend was the last of our asymmetrical Queen Anne-inspired houses, sporting towers, deep overhangs, and intricate gingerbread. The project was the culmination of all we had learned on the previous houses. Once it was done, we felt it was time to explore some new territory. The buyer was Barbara Marshall, collector and founder of the then new Kansas City Miniature Museum (now the Toy & Miniature Museum:  www.toyandminiaturemuseum.org.), a collection we feel honored to be part of.

Port Townsend rear view with greenhouse

The Port Townsend and the Megler Landing (house # 24), were variations on a theme. One of their major differences lay in their outbuildings. The Megler has an unattached garage, the Port Townsend has a greenhouse, in honor of Mrs. Marshall’s other miniature pursuit, propagating bonsai. Noel’s first drawing of the house showed a greenhouse with curved glass bordering the top edge of the walls, though I don’t think the curved glass really registered with me beyond knowing whatever he had drawn looked right. It was a few days before I looked him in the eye and asked, “How are we going to do this curved glass?” We had no idea, but put the thought away and went to work on the main house.

Knowing we couldn’t shape glass, we began looking for round-shouldered bottles we could cut, maybe with our window-glass scribing tools. One day in the supermarket Noel found a pickle jar with the perfect curve and bought a dozen or so (yes, we were lucky again, the pickles were good). However, the glass turned out to be too thick and irregular for our glass scribers. Before dollhouses, we were watchers of late-night TV, when those crazy Veg-O-Matic and Ginsu knife ads ran. One of that ilk was a gizmo that could cut a Michelob beer bottle to make a stemmed beer glass, should one feel the bottle was uncouth. It was one of those mind-sticking gimmicks people must have ordered, as a lot of them showed up later on garage sale tables. We knew we had seen one recently, but couldn’t remember where, and the concept of Googling had yet to be invented. Noel went into one of his mind-Googling trances and remembered a pyrothecnic trick from his childhood where he would, for inexplicable reasons other than it involved fire, soak a string in gasoline (where was his mother?!), tie it around a bottle, set it on fire and douse the whole thing in cold water. If he got lucky the glass cracked all the way around in a perfect circle. I saw this as a path to disaster, but Noel began the process of burning up string on pickle bottles. There was a lot of breakage, spillage of flammable liquids and more than one more trip to the grocery store, but eventually he got enough like-sized pieces to complete the greenhouse. He then treated the whole thing as a 3-D leaded glass window and copper-foiled and soldered the pieces together, adding stripwood for support and the illusion of a solid structure. The bottle glass is thicker and more distorted than the rest of the glass (old window glass), but the finished product is such a great illusion I don’t think anyone has noticed.

Port Townsend greenhouse

And while I’m on glass, there’s a trick we learned about using regular-thickness glass for miniature windows. Once you cut the glass to shape, darken the edges with a black felt-tip marker. This prevents light from reflecting off the cut edges, and once it is framed in wood channeling the thickness of the glass disappears. The mullions glued to either side of the glass appear to be one piece. The extra thin glass available for miniatures is very hard, and difficult to cut without a lot of practice. Plus, if you scavenge well, you can find many sources of old window glass, and get those vintage, wavy reflections. Try it. You will become a believer, too.

A few years after we completed the Port Townsend, the museum had a calamity—the heavy plaster ceiling collapsed. Huge chunks of plaster fell on the exhibits, most of which were inside glass cases, which helped buffer the blows. Many exhibits were spared, but quite a lot of plaster landed on our house. Barbara called, asking if we could come and make repairs. The damage looked so extensive no one there wanted to touch it. She was particularly concerned about the crushed weathervane, which was sheet brass, a Clare-Bell with a deer on it, and something we just happened to have another of. We packed up some paints and stripwood, our Exactos, Elmer’s, and the weathervane, and headed for Kansas City.

Chimney brace

We were relieved to see the building was of a piece, and after a day clearing away plaster and glass with a vacuum cleaner and paintbrushes, it became apparent that the damage was minimal, other than a very dead deer weathervane. What amazed us was that the chimney hadn’t toppled, considering the weight of the plaster. After construction, a contractor friend had insisted we add the brace because the chimney was too tall and would blow over in a medium windstorm. The sheet-lead brace we glued between chimney and roof somehow took the brunt of the blow. It dented into a “vee,” but stayed stuck and did its job as chimney support.

Pie coolor and exterior aging

As we worked, several docents asked about the weathervane–it seems the deer had a following, and its restoration to the top of the tower would indicate that all was well in the world. When they weren’t around, Noel jiggered with it, straightened it out, polished it on his shirt, and declared it savable. They applauded when we replaced it at the end of the first day. After that it was mostly a matter of repairing gutters and trim, re-touching paint, and we were done. For the duration we were treated royally, as guests in a wonderful downtown boutique hotel, tours through Barbara’s family farm, and dining out on Kansas City’s famous steaks. If it hadn’t been for our dog at home, and the pull of the next project, we might have lingered.

Megler Landing Miniature House, 1981

In 1981 we built two of our most elaborate Victorians—the first with a garage, and secret room, the other with a greenhouse–as well as the prototype and 20 shells for our first class. Plus we squeezed in a date night to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. The thought of that amount of work continues to stagger me. Does time really pass slower when we’re young? It has to be more than just an accumulation of double-digit daily work hours, bending time back on each of our days like a folding tape measure. A warp. Or a hole, one those black holes physicists continue to beat their brains over. If we were to start now we couldn’t check off even one of those projects in a year. Well, maybe the garage prototype. And the movie.

The Megler Landing, house #24, was a fun project from the get-go. A young couple approached us at a Seattle miniature show to build them a house. When we said it would be a four year wait, at the very least, they were not discouraged. By the time we got around to starting their project we had become pen pals, learning that she had become pregnant shortly after we met, followed by news of the birth of their son and subsequent holiday photos of his growth. They invited us to stay at their home on our way to and from delivering houses that preceded theirs (and the invitations did not cease after Noel spilled a glass of red wine on their white couch).

Megler Kitchen

In our correspondence we mentioned there was a secret room, and a garage for the men in the house. By the time we delivered their house, the son was 4 years old. His name was Brody, a name Noel etched into the dust of one of their mini-garage windows.

Megler Garage

The Megler name came from another nearby landmark, an expanse of basalt rocks on the Washington side of the Columbia where the Astoria-Megler ferry once docked. It was just up the river from McGowan where a family of that name had built a large Victorian home, nothing like our design, but one of the prominent Victorians in our neck of the woods.

Again we dug into our hoard of reference books to come up with something new. Until this time our houses had been mostly red or green with white trim, like the Victorians in our area. The modern interpretation of houses of the period. One book in particular—Exterior Decoration of the Victorian Era–showed more representative colors of the time–brooding, darker pallets, with color combinations closer in value. It included multiple illustrations of a single design with different color treatments, making the overall effect easier to imagine. As the owners-to-be were deep into Victoriana, we dove into a deep red and green color scheme, with yellow ochre for the window mullions. After a quick check for the owner’s least favorite color for a house (purple), we started in. As was our pattern, our first stop was the hardware store to have them try to mix our colors. From there it was back to the studio to mix in some umbers, as the formula colors always wound up too bright. Then we took the plunge, hoping the final effect would look rich, rather than gloomy.

On location in Los Angeles with Harry Liles

The night of our delivery of the Megler (via Los Angeles to have it photographed in our friend Harry Liles’s studio), long after we were tucked into their guestroom bed, the owner spent hours sitting in the dark with the house, its lights on, figuring out the location of the secret room. We were sure it would take weeks, if not months. But she had it by 2:00 a.m.

Note: Recently the ownership of the house changed. It is now on permanent display at the Gateway Museum Center in Maysville, KY.

Mt. St. Helen's erupts, May 18, 1980, USGS Photograph taken by Austin Post.

Our biggest event of 1980 was the eruption of nearby Mt. St. Helen’s on May 18—not exactly in our back yard, but close enough. At around 8:30 that morning a plume of molten rock blew 80,000 feet in the air, sprinkling 11 states with ash, melting several glaciers within the volcano, and triggering widespread landslides. Rivers and towns were clogged with debris, and 57 people lost their lives. The cataclysm blasted the Spirit Lake YMCA Camp that Noel attended as a boy, along with the codgerly and stubborn Harry Truman, owner of a nearby lodge Noel remembers, into the cosmos. For our laid-back (and largely unemployed) friend Rocky–who just happened to be giving flying lessons, and own the gas tank, at the tiny Toledo, WA airport that would become the base of rescue operations, and the world press—it meant a living. When the mountain blew he was eating cereal in a lawn chair, camera in hand, watching for the eruption. Not only did he get a series of photos that would sell thousands of posters, but he had the notion to scrawl a sign on sheet of plywood, and post it at the entrance to the airport—Rocky’s Volcano Flights.

Mt. St. Helens miniature house

Our part of the state was spared devastation. In Seaview our eyes were glued to the TV coverage, while our hands were rolling out # 23, a house suddenly named the Mt. St. Helens. We were relieved to have only a little ash in the yard (I ran out with a vial to dust it off the plants with a paint brush), and, eventually, endless balls of pumice rolling into our beach.

Tower exterior

For this project Noel decided to vary our architectural menu by designing a house with a square tower. The tower enclosed a large, wainscoted room with tall windows that could be used for star-gazing. And for more romance, a hatch in the ceiling lead to a small widow’s walk on the roof. The flip side of the hatch held a bench from which to view the skies.

Tower interior

Widow's walk with bench

Plus, the house had the kind of back porch I imagined as the mythical Granny-inhabitant’s perfect, solitary retreat to cool off after a hot summer’s day of cooking and canning. As with many houses of the period, and locale, the back porch was an add-on, sided in board-and-batten rather than the more expensive horizontal drop-siding on the main structure. Back porches were always an excuse for a screen door, and a chance to try another kind of spring, so it would close with a convincing little slap, of the kind that made your mother yell, “How many times have I told you kids not to slam the screen door?!” Over the years we tried springs from old cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens, and then a little envelope of  3/64^th” springs that turned up, either from a friend or from one of our foraging missions at the surplus warehouse in Seattle. They did pretty well, though I don’t know how they held up over time.

The finishing touch was to be the ash, sprinkled on the rooftops and ledges, but my vial-full  from the yard wasn’t going to be enough. For that we called on Rocky–now owner of 5 airplanes, and official transporter of the Air National Guard and world vulcanologists–who flew in with jars of ash, and tiny pumice for the garden.

20th Street Emporium miniature building

For us, the appeal of the 20^th St. Emporium commission was the idea of a shop with an apartment above, combining the bustle of public space with the private, domestic life upstairs. Miniatures are never simply about the objects or the architecture, they are about the lives of the inhabitants of small spaces. We learned early on that the adult’s attraction for dollhouses is the same as the child’s—we want to get our faces in each room, close enough to imagine ourselves inside.  It also involves the attraction of voyeurism, what we see through the window when we walk down a street at night, glancing into homes with people sitting around the dinner table, or reading the paper. We are drawn into their lives, the hominess of the scene.  A world of illusion, without strife, or bills to pay. This is why we designed our houses and buildings to look complete on the front, but then to have every interior space as accessible as possible, either through open walls, or window sections that swung open for a larger view. Yes, little rooms like bathrooms, closets and halls were often available only in glimpses, or with dental mirrors, but that has its appeal too. Every view offers an invitation to dream.

I found this B&W photo of the Emporium basement, taken by the original owners, Mr. Peepers Miniatures in Seattle. Besides all the detail we built into it—furnace, coal bin, tiny window, lighting strung across the ceiling, brick walls, cement floor—it is two other details, provided by the owners, that bring this room to life—the set-up ladder, and the open door. It is no longer a replica room, but a scene from life.  Someone has just left the room, we imagine, maybe to find a bulb to replace the one over the ladder. We have been transformed from watchers to participators. We believe. It is that element that kept Noel and me going all those years. The building was just the foundation, so to speak, for creating that feeling of someone just having left the room.

Emporium Kitchen

Noel and I have both been apartment dwellers, so the Emporium kitchen reflects everything we wished for in our apartments—an eat-in kitchen, and window over the sink, from which to watch the world while washing the dishes. We sacrificed counter space to make the room for the old fashioned Roper range and fridge then on the market. The cutting board is pulled out, and there’s that tell-tale open door again. How simple it is to capture us, once we want to be caught.

Bedroom off the kitchen

In our own house, as well as in many old homes we visited, there was usually a closet or two that hadn’t been redone when a room was updated. Instead you saw old pink calcimine paint, or out-of-style wallpaper from an earlier era. Another trigger for the imagination. The side opening of the Emporium provided a perfect location for such a closet. Plus, Mr. Peepers had just found someone making detailed and in-scale water heaters—the perfect addition to the room off the kitchen.

What’s barely discernible in these photos is the pressed tin ceiling, a staple of apartments and commercial buildings of the era. The project involved expanses of ceiling space, so we needed a good solution. In another case of friends helping friends, combined with the Eureka process, we talked over our dilemma with Bob, a contractor friend and aficionado of Victorian detail. His face lit up as he reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out his newly printed business cards. They were embossed with an ornate Victorian gingerbread design. He said all kinds of designs were available at the local printery. This immediately morphed into our finding an embossed design that could be ganged-up on a business-sized card to look like tin ceiling panels.  Rick the printer loved the idea (he also printed our miniature newspaper insulation) and helped us find a suitable design. The bas relief was subtle, just enough to translate into the feeling of pressed tin, without drawing too much attention to itself. One sensed it was there, and knew what it represented without thinking about it. An added benefit was that when we glued the “panels” to the ceilings, the card stock warped slightly, just the way the full-size tin panels do. Once they were in place, we painted them off-white, with enough gloss to reflect off the raised portions.

Embossed business cards for tin ceilings

Of course the minimum order was a box of 500, far more than we needed, but the box was small, and the price not astronomical. We used only a fraction of them on the Emporium, and later used more to represent the embossed wainscotings Anaglypta and Lincrusta–popular turn of the century wallcoverings–in a formal library room, by staining the panels brown. My New England parents taught me never to throw anything away, giving us permission to hoard many of our supplies, and possible supplies (some day I’ll write about our rust collection).

Emporium soda fountain with tiled floors

Being our first commercial building, the 20^thSt. Emporium required a jump-start for our learning curve. The three-story structure would include a 7-stool soda fountain and mirrored backbar. To show it off we wanted gold-leaf lettering embellishing the reflective surface of the old wavy-glass display window. We also wanted a real tile floor, not an embossed paper look-alike, preferably white tiles with angled corners to allow for even tinier black tile inserts at the junction of each cluster of four. Again, tile would reflect more light, and draw the viewer inside. We wanted the building to have a warm, gem-like feel. How we would accomplish these things was a mystery, but we forged ahead, and waited for the solutions. This time they came from people we met along the way.

Emporium entry

At one of the early miniature shows, we ran into Marie Freidman of Portland, OR. She was selling egg-shell thin dinnerware, Delft tiles, light fixtures with real cranberry glass shades, and leather horse saddles, all made by Marie, and in 1/12 scale. At her home she showed us her multiple workshops, full of specialized tools and supplies. Marie was one of those people gifted with an engineer’s mind and a craftsperson’s soul. She could figure out how to make anything she wanted to, as well as complete it with an artist’s sensibility. She liked us and our work enough to offer to make lights for us, as many as we needed, just for the satisfaction of making them. Marie didn’t want our money, saying she’d figure out some kind of return down the road. When we asked her about making floor tiles for the Emporium, she was up for it. She built molds to fire hundreds of ½”sq. white tiles, new molds for the ¼”sq. black centers, and conjured a way to make the perfect angle cuts on each of the white tiles, so the black pieces would edge into the pattern smoothly (unfortunately I do not have a better photo to illustrate that pattern). It was our job to lay them on a near-perfect grid, and then age them, both to kill the gloss (we had no idea how shiny they would be, they all but jumped out of the room) and create a surface we could age with paints. The glaze turned out to be extremely hard, but Noel sanded, scoured, used glass-etching acid and rasped away enough of the surface to convincingly age them. Plus he broke and cracked a few in the corners and heavily trafficked areas. And, we had enough leftover to tile the entrance out to the sidewalk.

Gold Leaf lettered window, 20th St. Emporium miniature

The second chance meeting came one night when Noel went out for a beer at a place called The Sore Thumb—a moonlight business built and owned by, of course, a local contractor. On the way in he noticed a van decorated with intricate, hand lettered signs, much of it in gold and silver leaf. At the bar he joined a group of cohorts talking with a woman he didn’t recognize. Sure enough, she was a traveling sign painter, and gold leaf was her specialty. She latched onto the miniatures idea, and give Noel a quick course in using thin, fragile pages of gold leaf to letter on glass. This process of glass gilding involved buying empty gelatin capsules at the drug store (that took some explaining), which were then dissolved in water and applied to the glass as a sticky surface to letter on. She gave him a copy of her favorite book on the subject—Gold Leaf Technique, by Raymond J. LeBlanc—along with some specialized brushes and a tiny envelope of gold leaf—more than enough to finish a number of mini projects—to get him started. As Noel had learned hand lettering in advertising art classes at Los Angeles Art Center (in the Stone Age when young art directors specked type and hand-lettered their ads) he had the tools necessary to take on the challenge.

Along with help from the people we met along the way, I am reminded of a girl, around age 17, who wrote us a thoughtful and articulate letter, asking if she could come apprentice with us after high school, living with us and learning our techniques. She liked what we did, and aspired to become a dollhouse maker in her own right. We thought a long while, wondering how we’d respond if Noel’s teenage daughter proposed something similar. Plus, we knew we couldn’t work with anyone else—our schedule was too erratic, our methods and life-style too off-the-cuff, and our house and studio too tiny to accommodate anyone else. And we talked about the varied paths that got us where we were. Noel’s art and advertising background, my growing up in a 200 yr. old house, and majoring in theater and running the scene shop in college played heavily in what we made in miniature. Plus, we’d learned a work ethic from years of working for other people. Our Dear Joan letter back to the girl explained all this and suggested she go to college, learn about everything she could, get a job, and figure out what she liked to do.  Then, if she still wanted to make dollhouses, she’d have all the background necessary. Yes, killjoys, but maybe she’s out there doing something she loves. Given how motivated she was then, I have my hopes.

Front window, 20th Street Emporium

In 1980 we seem to have slowed a bit, producing two structures, compared to the 3-4 we completed in previous years.  I sometimes imagine there was a time warp, or black hole, in Seaview that allowed us to make houses and watch The Muppet Show while the world with Jimmy Carter as President and the start of Iran-Iraq war spun on by. Given the elaborate designs and detail work of each project, I still don’t understand how we did it, but the hows and wherefores are surprisingly vivid.

The 20th Street Emporium 1980

The first structure of the year was The 20^th Street Emporium, a Victorian commercial building, our first veering from strictly residential architecture. The clients ran a miniature shop, and wanted lots of rooms to show off their merchandise. The name was inspired by the 20^th Street Drugstore where Noel’s dad would take him for malts as a young boy in Longview, Washington. The design and signage came from a trip we took to Port Townsend, WA, a late 19^th century Olympic Peninsula hillside seaport known for its ornate Victorian architecture. It was also our first venture into the world of B&B’s—an expenditure we justified by it being a research trip. I booked it over the phone. The woman I spoke with let me know that arrival after 6:00 p.m. would be extremely inconvenient. Sure enough, we dawdled along on the scenic 4-hour drive, exploring the Hood Canal, and arrived at something like 6:15. Our climb up the front steps to the house on the bluff was rewarded with a locked door. We rang the bell, and waited. There was a click and a buzz, but we moved too slowly and found the door still locked. Rang again, with one hand on the knob, and were buzzed in to a Victoria foyer, which opened into a large, ornately furnished room, with a check-in area empty of living souls. Across the room was another room, the dining room, with a velvet rope across the wide opening. At the table a family was engrossed in their supper, studiously unaware of our presence. We approached. When we got to the rope we said we would like to check in. The woman at the table rose stiffly, came around to us through another door, and told us to go to the desk and ring the bell.

Port Townsend today--The Rose Theater

Despite the inauspicious beginning (and a couple of rather strained breakfasts with the owner and two other guests), we had a wonderful time. There was an iron bathtub long enough to totally submerge a body, though I was too frugal to fill it deeper than just covering my legs. Still, the bed was heavenly, and we were gaga over the Victorian-ness of it all. We explored the town, studied the rot and aging on glorious mansions, everyday houses and a slew of well-preserved 1880′s buildings downtown. The brickwork was our biggest discovery—finding out how bricks are laid in sections of 5 courses, with the bricks turned endwise (the end-width rather than the face-width of the brick) for the sixth course, for strength. Plus, it became apparent that bricklayers had their signature styles, and brickworks had their signature bricks. We spent most of our time with our noses 6” from the buildings, noting where things went wrong, or right. The signage was another find—Fisher’s Flour and Selz Blue Shoes being our favorites. Again, our interest was focused on how the signs aged, and how different they looked close-up and from a distance.

News Item in The Chinook Observer, April 1980

It was also a weekend that almost changed our lives. We fell in love with the smaller Victorians, the views, and the town as a whole.  It was a lifetime source for our dollhouses, and a ferry ride from Seattle. While driving the hills we stopped and talked to a man working on a house we could easily imagine ourselves living in. He was fixing it up to sell—something like $20,000-$25,000., which in 1980 was  steeper than it sounds, but still within our reach. Maybe. We could sell the house in Seaview, and move. We spent the evening dreaming and talking, but by morning decided we couldn’t afford to own a Victorian while trying to live on dollhouses. Plus we had endless clam digging and a community of friends in Seaview, and didn’t want to abandon that life. But we went away with enough photographs and dreams to carry us through the laborious months of bricking a miniature commercial building. Did we count how many bricks? Never. Didn’t want to know.

Newly re-shingled house

We may not be making miniatures houses any more, but we don’t seem to be able to leave this house-finishing business alone. About the time of my last post, two months ago, a swarm of ladder-and-crowbar-wielding men began tearing the dented 70’s aluminum siding off our full-size, 1928 house.

It was one of those projects that began as a repair, and burgeoned into a summer-long re-do. When we first bought the house, 11 years ago, we found a tiny picture of it with its original shingle siding at the assessor’s office, and always hoped we could restore it to that look. The aluminum siding crowded the door and window trims, and filled in most of the roof overhang, the end result being it just didn’t look the way it was meant to. A little stubby and confined in the wrong coat. We re-painted, and added shrubbery but it still looked like a mis-fit.

Aluminum comes off, Day 1

On Day One the de-constructors revealed filthy, Pepto-Bismal pink shingles under the aluminum—some areas trimmed in lavender, some in the same shade of pink, and others in chartreuse. We had heard from neighborhood old-timers about the all pink house, and found traces of it, but seeing it in its entirety was a shock. Almost embarrassing, like catching someone outside in their ancient pink nightie. Other points of interest included thousands of spider nests in the happy playground between shingles and aluminum, and surprisingly few examples of the rot we love to show on our miniatures.

Rot & spider nests

Some mystery openings appeared on the back of the house, possible remnants of a vertical pie cooler area from the original kitchen. We and the house spent that night under a blue tarp and threatening skies. Inside we were bathed in an eerie blue light.

Days Two-to-Three and we went to all black—new water-barrier tarpaper where the old had been removed. There were times when men on ladders seemed to inhabit every window of the house.

View from my dining room office

Work continued on the back where there’s a downstairs bath room addition that had been built poorly, and was full of rot. The window had only been set into the frame (no wonder that room was so drafty), and not attached to the house. The workers removed the nearby downspout along with the window to clear the rot, then, at the end of the day set window back in the hole for the night. Sure enough, at 6:00 the next morning we had a gully-washer–water cascaded down the roof and downspout hole and inside the top of the window. I phoned the contractor’s phone, then Noel and I alternated trying to jury rig a garbage bag tarp to the wall on the outside, and funneling and mopping on the inside. Multiple calls to the contractor went unanswered, but at 8:30 his 9-months pregnant wife appeared with towels and profuse apologies. By then the rain had stopped, two workers had arrived with a downspout fix, and we were pretty well mopped-up.

Day One-original pink shingles

End of Day 2

Day Four dawned with a Sani-Can adorning the parking space in front of the garage, followed by the delivery of 6 ft. stacks of cedar shingle squares. The cedar smelled like campfires, and signaled the best part of the job. At this point, the house felt like one of our mini-houses—a nice clean shell awaiting its shingles. It is also when the work slowed down, as we have many more architectural ins and outs than I was ever aware of. It took one man—the master shingler–over a week just to fit the shingles around the front door extension. He had to hand-cut nearly every one, weaving the corners to keep the rain from finding a track in, just as we had done on multiple little structures. They seemed happy to have us compliment their work, but I think they thought we were a little nuts when we’d compare it to what we did in miniature. There was never even a flicker of interest in our miniature houses, they just wanted to get the job done.

As you can imagine, the noise level in and around the house was anything but miniature. When they weren’t tearing things off, the workers were pounding nails in, ratcheting ladders up and down the walls, and running portable saws of varying sizes. Our days began with a trip to doggie daycare to drop off the traumatized Max, our almost-2 cockapoo. Noel fled to his painting studio downtown, and I moved the laptop down to the dining room, or the furthest corner from the main racket. The neighbors went quiet, but, when asked, showed enthusiasm for the project. The workers were great about cleaning up at the end of the day, to the point of raking and sweeping up, but my evening patrols usually netted a handful of Red Bull and powdered donut empties in the shrubbery.

Day 60

By Day Sixty, the job was largely done, if not in the unrealistically estimated three weeks. Too many unpredictables. To this day, we are not quite done—still awaiting that elusive bathroom window replacement, promised, once again, for this Thursday. And a few adjustments to the downspouts, a little trim paint here and there, but by and large done. I haven’t quite become accustomed to the new look of the house—maybe it’s the orange color of new cedar, brilliant in some lights–but I do love it overall. Architecturally, it looks as it was meant to from the start, and is a much more graceful house than before. Its new skin is the right fit. Once the cedar grays down it will look more as I imagined. It is curious how it looks like something we might have built—before the Bug Juice. In all its newness, it seems to cry out for weather and age, which will come, and the Thomas trademark touch of rot, but I think we’ll skip the latter on this one.

And  yes, the contractor’s wife delivered an on-time, blooming, 10 lb. 12 oz. baby girl, her sixth child.  No wonder Daddy works so hard. The Sani-Can is gone, and while I never saw anyone enter or exit, it must have been well-used by the 12 or so men fueled solely, it seemed, by Red Bull and powdered donuts.

Coming Attractions: Next week I’ll be returning to the story of our miniature houses.