By Cathy Miller

Dollhouses. The word hardly describes the fantastic structures found in this story. As a wee sprout, my grandparents had a very old, metal dollhouse for play on their porch. Four rooms and minimal plastic furniture, it was, nonetheless, a favorite. Fast forward to a beautiful autumn afternoon at the life-size home of Dr. Steven and Elena Riesenberg of Washington. Dr. Riesenberg has a dental practice in Washington and Elena works from home managing the office, doing the payroll and accounts payable. Over the past couple years, the duo has discovered the pleasure, relaxation, challenges and creative outlet of building their own dollhouses, veritable estates compared to that of my childhood!

Here’s a bit of background on their hobby built on building!

Every year, Elena sets a new goal for herself. She explained, “I’ll try something different, nothing life-changing, but self-improvement.” One year she was determined to cook every day. She speaks five languages, so another year she attempted to learn Chinese, but found it was extremely difficult. Even her friends warned her it would be challenging. “It was a total failure,” she laughed. She used Duolingo online, spending about an hour a day with the app. Next up was Italian, which was a bit easier. She’d progressed “to conversational Italian, but there was never anyone to talk to, so then you forget. No one cared that I knew how to say those words!” She also learned Swahili, saying “it’s easy. But how many times can you brag to people that you know some Swahili?” She took up archery one year and recalled, “We had fun with that.” One year Elena said, “I want a vegetable garden, just a four corner garden, white picket fence, a Martha Stewart kind of thing. The first year we had an abundance of everything. The following year, Steve decided to expand it and build rock walls (which he’s very good at). The problem with that rock wall was that it was sloping, so all that the deer had to do was go up, and then down, and that was it!” Much of their garden bounty became an unintentional gift to the resident deer.

Elena thought someday their daughter might have a daughter, reflecting that she’d like her granddaughter to have a dollhouse. “When she was younger,” Elena said of her daughter, “Steve and I worked on a tiny dollhouse for her, just doing it on our own. We were building it from scratch, but we never got to finish it. I always felt bad about that. We had questions as to how to build it but there was no YouTube or Google, so it ended up sitting in our basement for ten years. Finally we donated it to a charity auction at St. Joseph’s Church.”

At the start of 2018, Elena announced, “I’m going to make a dollhouse, from beginning to end.” She opted for Greenleaf’s Garfield House. Of everything she and Steve have worked on thus far, this was the biggest and the most difficult. “The house was beautiful. It actually had a most interesting and unique floor plan. It was like a real house, the twists and turns of it. But the quality of the wood was really bad. You’d get splinters, it was very rough. The directions were hard to follow too.” There is a whole community of miniaturists online, and Elena was lucky to find two blogs on how to complete the Garfield. So that was the first dollhouse they built. It was overwhelming, but they agreed, “We need to build more.” Elena said at one point Steve actually wanted to toss the Garfield out. She said, “Let’s not, we can do something with this. We did change the plan quite a bit, and actually it turned out better.”

Elena calculated it took around four months to finish the Garfield House, five hundred audible (e-book) hours, and about 33 audio books. She explained, “We listen to audio books while we’re doing this.” Steve interjected, “We listen to your stuff.” Elena amended with, “It’s mostly mine, but he listens to his sci-fi stuff.” Whoever is first to say, “Alexa turn on…”

Since January 1, 2018, Elena and Steve have completed six dollhouses (listed below). They are scaled to 1:12, meaning 1-inch is equal to 12-inches in real life, so a 6-foot person is portrayed as 6 inches. They’ve built only one smaller model at 1:24.

Elena keeps notes and photos of everything they’ve built. She explained her system for tracking their creations. “When we build these houses, they all have names and we incorporate that. I pick unique identifiers for each house, both unique to us and unique to the dollhouse.” Each of the Riesenberg’s architectural delights is given an address with some sort of personal meaning, plus a “zip code” starting with 00001 for their first dollhouse, and onward “until whatever.”
     • Greenleaf’s Garfield House (light green) – 27 Garfield Avenue, Greenleaf, XY 00001
     • Real Good Toys’ Newport House (pink) – 1999 Codington Lane, Newport, XY 00002
     • Tiffani’s General Store (stone front) – no address, but a zip code of XY 00003
     • Real Good Toys’ Vermont Farmhouse (yellow) – 63 Somerset Lane, Vermont, XY 00004
     • Real Good Toys’ Beachside Bungalow (blue) – 1994 Hampton Road, Avenel, XY 00005
     • Dental Office Roombox (gifted by a former Hampton resident who wanted to pay it forward) – 33 Broad Street, Washington, XY 00006
     • The 1960’s Rehab (gray) – no address yet since it isn’t finished

For the most part the Riesenbergs work from kits. Elena keeps an eye out for sales, coupons for Hobby Lobby, and thrift store and yard sale finds. The kit includes everything required to construct the shell of the house. Then it’s time to choose the paint, shingles, and all the specialized accessories. Sometime shingles are included, but it’s possible to purchase more realistic ones. Elena uses real shingles, only miniaturized, saying, “There’s a whole market for this.”

Their kitchen table has been relegated to “workshop” status, elbow-deep with tools, and paints, and glue, and all manner of wallpaper, furniture, and other useful items. What a sight for any artist or crafter!

The Newport House, Vermont Farmhouse, and Beachside Bungalow are all kits from Real Good Toys, a solid brand to work with. Elena plans, paints, designs the interiors and decorates. According to her, Steve does the “he-man stuff” – landscape, cement, electrical wiring, any big, heavy lifting, like the base (he clarified “stuff I can’t screw up too badly”), anything that has to do with using power tools. Power tools? On a dollhouse? Steve explained, “Such as a Dremel and even a dental hand-piece drill – I work miniature all day long too. There’s also a miniature miter saw and table saw.” It’s amazing how much carpentry is involved with these dollhouses.

The Newport House is a mansion with marble floors, winding staircases, and many fine details. The house was frozen in time. Sitting on a miniature table was a miniature newspaper dated the day after the Titanic sank in 1912, with an article about the disaster. Elena said, “It was historical, and really, a wealthy person’s house.”

The stone front General Store was made from a thirty year old kit purchased at a garage sale at Immaculata High School in Somerville. It was $4. (Normally kits start around $150, and could cost upwards of $1200!). This dollhouse represents a time from before World War I, when the American flag had only 48 stars, and the sign on the door read “Open until dark.”

They recently completed a replica of Steve’s workplace, soon to be housed at his dental practice. It includes his personal office, with a miniaturized version of his actual diploma displayed on the wall, and the examination room with all the expected (and well-loved) tools of the trade that one would find in a real-life dental practice, including the dentist! The Dentist Office is called a “room box.” A room box consists of only one or two rooms, it’s not the whole structure, whereas a dollhouse is multiple rooms, generally eight or nine, and much bigger.

The Riesenbergs have donated dollhouses to Rossi’s Festival of Trees, Abilities’ Diamonds in the Sky, and Habitat For Humanity’s Beams ‘n’ Dream. They have also given dollhouses to a couple children. Elena spoke about finding young recipients for those two donations. “The first dollhouse (Garfield House) we completed, we gave away. We spent a lot of time on it, and I didn’t spare anything to make it look good inside. We gave it to the Valerie Fund in Morristown in April 2018, and through them it was donated to a seven year old, who’d had cancer and was in remission. In December 2018, the Newport House was donated to a little girl, also through the Valerie Fund. “We delivered it to the child’s house a few days before Christmas.” Steve said, “We usually give it directly to the kid, but the parents wanted to give it to her for Christmas…from Santa Claus.”

Since the basic dollhouse is a kit, would they ever consider creating their own blueprints to build from? Elena said Steve wants to do that. He added, “I think it would be easier.” Elena mused, “I guess you could miniaturize it. You get a blueprint and everything is already to scale. Use your math, yeah, you could do it.” Elena noted there are currently more women than men involved in dollhouse construction, but those men are creating stunning works.

Usually the dollhouses consist of eight or nine rooms, sometimes the smaller ones are six. Based on standard eight-foot ceilings, each dollhouse floor would measure around eight inches tall. The huge pink mansion was nine or ten inches per floor. Elena said there’s a thriving community of buyers and sellers on e-Bay and Facebook, which is especially nice, with people making, selling and buying all kinds of items. “It’s like it’s recycled among them all. You get to meet them and be friends with them. A lot of what we’ve bought has come from those groups,” she added.

In addition to kits for the dollhouses, there are also small kits for furniture. “Some of the furniture I’ve built, not from kits. Some furniture kits, I’ve assembled. They’re very easy to put together,” Elena said, adding, “the problem is the staining part. I can’t stand the smell. It’s easier to just buy it.”

Their miniaturized homes are completely customized with some purchased furnishings, some handmade. There is wallpaper, flooring, carpeting, window treatments, bathroom fixtures, and working lights (electric, not battery-powered). The interiors are pretty much free form, whatever Elena’s vision may be. The exteriors utilize authentic roofing, gutters, mailboxes, and all manner of realistic and beautiful landscaping. The attention to details is remarkable. These dollhouses really are for adults, not necessarily for children, although as noted previously, the Riesenbergs have given a couple houses away to youngsters.

When does the “unique look” of the house come into play? Elena said, “You get the kit and begin to assemble it. It all comes together as we’re building it. For instance the beachside bungalow wasn’t supposed to be a beach house. The general store originally had a brick face, but Steve didn’t like that so he swapped out the bricks for stone. I actually used a harvest motif originally, and then changed it to Christmas.”

Everything looks pretty traditional, homey, comfy and warm when peering into one of these delightful dollhouses. When asked if she ever plans to do something more modern or futuristic, Elena said, “There’s a kit called Malibu. One day I’d like to do that. My friends have been asking, ‘Don’t you want to do contemporary?’ If I find something, I’ll try it. It’s harder to find contemporary-style furniture, because most people deal with traditional.” She also mentioned some wonderful Haunted Houses that she’s seen, along with Urban Streetscapes, and others as well. The possibilities are limitless.

Currently, Elena and Steve are “rehabbing” a massive structure, calculated to be from the 1960s. The name of its creator is unknown, but Elena marvels at the intricacy in every aspect of the dollhouse, having been lovingly built completely from the ground up, not one bit from a kit. It’s a two-floor home, with a full basement (which includes a bar and utility room), and a separate stand-alone greenhouse, landscaped with stonework paths, flowers, lighting, grass and gravel. For safety reasons, Steve had to replace all the decades-old wiring. They had to scrape paint and get rid of wallpaper. “It’s harder to rehab than to start from scratch,” Elena explained, “It was very dirty to begin with. We got rid of the beautiful shingles that it had because we couldn’t clean them. It was missing some and we couldn’t replace them because the designer made them himself. It’s really amazing what the guy did.” Elena explained how the Riesenbergs acquired this extraordinary find. “The Rehab was donated to a thrift store in Somerville and I bought it from them last year, August 2018. The store is non-profit and directly benefits The Center School, a private, non-profit, state-accredited facility for bright, learning-disabled students.”

Realistically, what’s the time commitment to finish one of these beauties? “That depends,” Elena offered. “For the Beachside Bungalow, it was a month, but that was a smaller house, and Steve created the beach look. Two to three months is average. We only work on them when we have free time. The Rehab is taking us a lot longer. We’re not really working too hard to finish it since it’s going to be mine. In fact, for now, I plan on not decorating our house for Christmas because I want to decorate the Rehab dollhouse. The clean up will be easier. We’ll have a Christmas tree, but that’s about it!”

What did Elena select as her annual self-improvement project for 2019? In addition to continuing their not so trivial dollhouse pursuit, in January Elena and Steve took up pottery, attending classes in Branchburg, designing some clever votive candleholders and shallow (bowls) mugs.

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