Doll's House

Special Auction Services is selling what it bills as ‘the largest and most valuable doll collection to been seen at auction for 25 years’.

The toy company of Lines is often mentioned in relation to rocking horses but it was a double bay-fronted dolls’ house produced in c.1895 that impressed at Sheffield saleroom Ellis Willis & Beckett (19.5% buyer’s premium).

Dolls’ houses from the collection of a renowned expert and author came to auction in Kent.

‘The Gregson House’ and its contents date from the early Victorian period.

The Five Centuries sale at Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium) featured items from Borders property Kimmerghame, Duns, home of the Swinton family.

A rare large-scale Erzgebirge mid-19th century painted wooden market was one of the stand-out lots of the largest-ever Toys, Dolls, Dolls’ Houses and Teddy Bears sale to be staged by Special Auction Services (20% buyer’s premium) in Newbury.

Such is the recent appeal of dolls’ house accessories that you do not even need the ‘house’ to put them in, it seems.

Furnished dolls’ houses and accessories in general are proving the most dynamic area of the collecting market

The strong level of prices being paid by collectors for dolls’ house furniture was underlined at a recent C&T sale.

The collecting market for dolls’ house furniture has been enjoying a boom period if recent prices have been anything to go by.

A copy of the Royal Doulton dinner service commissioned in 1922 for Queen Mary’s doll’s house sold for a top-estimate £30,000 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) as part of the Thomas Goode auction at Sotheby’s.

A 19th century doll’s house sold for £8500 at North Yorkshire saleroom Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) – but its real appeal came from what was inside.

The first specialist sale of dolls and dolls’ houses at Lacy Scott & Knight (20% buyer’s premium) of Bury St Edmunds was based mainly around a single collection.

Comprising what amounted to a crowded Regency household, fully and elegantly furnished and inhabited by half a dozen bisque or parian dolls, a c.1820 mahogany dolls’ cabinet was the outstanding offering from C&T Auctioneers (18% buyer’s premium) in Tunbridge Wells.

Antique dolls supremo Judy Bebber has been organising the biannual Kensington Doll Show at Kensington Town Hall for 20 years.