This room started out as just a storeroom. About 15 years later, I bought the desk and chair, so the room now doubles as an office. The hardwood floor is made from balsa wood strips.
This is the desk and chair. You can see that the owner of this sweet shop likes her wine! The vintage yellow telephone dates back to my very first dollhouse, a wooden 8-room house by Creative Playthings.
I just adore the mini office supplies! The handwritten letter and grocery list were written by my mom when she was a child. I think the playing cards were also hers.
Inside the desk drawer are a passport, European travel brochure, plane ticket, and postcards.
I built the storeroom shelves when I was a kid. (The legs are a bit wobbly.) I think the cookbook and other two books were part of my mom’s collection. The scale went with the old-fashioned kitchen appliances in the original sweet shop.
Notice how the stairway leads directly into the wall. Oops!
The antique radio was made by my friend Salvatore Ciccorelli from Torino, Italy. When I visited him many years ago, his greatest passion was recreating authentic Italian-style houses in miniature. After that trip, I wrote an article about his amazing dollhouses for Dollhouse Miniatures magazine. And it wouldn’t be stretching the truth to say that he was somewhat of an inspiration for my current “Street of Shops” projects.
The Barilla pasta boxes are relatively new (from the 1990s), but the other four grocery items on that shelf are from the 1970s. The glass lamp also dates back to the ’70s.
Inside the Halloween and Easter baskets are some round, brown seeds that I collected during our visit to Phoenix, AZ, when I was 10 years old. I wrapped some of them in colored foil; the others are downstairs on display in the sweet shop. The plastic fruit is part of a much larger collection of plastic dollhouse food that I used in my first childhood dollhouse. The green and red dishes are from the same period.
