Senior Sacramento sisters, 81 and 90, found a dreamworld running their dollhouse shop
The whole dollhouse obsession started with a whim. Barbara Taplin was browsing in a hobby shop near her home at the time, in 1970s Newport Beach. She was a dental hygienist in her 40s, she noticed a kit that would let you build a little Victorian four-poster bed. It looked so cute that she bought it.
She had never played with dolls as a girl — she was more a rough-and-tumble type. But once she built the bed, she had to have a quilt. Once she arranged the quilt, she needed nightstands. After the nightstands, she wanted a floor. Walls. Wallpaper. A bathroom.
By 1979, she had moved to Sacramento with her lobbyist husband and become an avowed miniaturist with her shop in Arden Arcade, the Elegant Dollhouse, where Taplin, now 90, still works six days a week.
The shop is another world, filled almost floor to ceiling with shelves full of homes and rooms; a rotating carousel display is filled with dangling mugs smaller than an almond; an intricate four-piece wooden bedroom set is $300 (layaway available!).
Taplin said she started the shop to be her own boss and do something she loved, but also to spite her husband Irvin’s friends who said the business wouldn’t last six months. So far, she’s lasted 43 years, and the shop has the worn out green shag carpet to prove it.
Her sister, Linda Vertrees, 81, who runs the shop with her, interrupted to set the record straight. She asserted Taplin started the shop “so you could buy your own stuff wholesale.”
Not all the materials are expensive enough to warrant opening your own small business. Taplin and Vertrees pointed out salvaged materials in display rooms and dollhouses. A friend of theirs had made a wood floor out of a repurposed placemat and a tiled roof of painted single-face corrugated cardboard. Taplin carved up an oatmeal tube, put stucco on the outside and turned the interior into a spiral stone staircase.
Their customers, Taplin said, are mostly “little old ladies,” though some have made miniature devotees of their grandchildren. In 1979, “this was the hottest stuff.” The same year, Jeanne Lesem, a writer for news service United Press International, wrote that dollhouse miniatures were “the fastest-growing hobby in the United States,” and The Bee wrote that there were three miniature shops in the Sacramento area alone. Since then, the hobby has fallen out of fashion.
For these Sacramento sisters, though, it’s still an escape. When the regular-size world gets too overwhelming, they retreat to the worlds they build to scale. One time, Taplin said, she woke up in the morning and went to work on a dollhouse, still in her pajamas. It felt like she’d been there for a few hours when she heard her husband come in the door. She’d been working on the dollhouse for over eight hours.
After her husband died in 2006, Taplin turned to her dollhouses as a source of comfort. Both sisters said that when they’re working, they fall into a kind of trance, thinking only of the detailed work in front of them. Vertrees’ current project is a little patio with two chairs and a cat; her favorite room she’s made sits on a shelf near the front and depicts a scene based on a famous painting of dogs playing poker.
“Yes,” Vertrees said, “it takes your mind away from reality.”
Taplin said that she’s made dozens of rooms and houses over the years; she and Vertrees keep many in the store. But Taplin only has one large dollhouse at her home — about 3 feet tall, it’s especially beautiful, she said, and modeled on a real two-story home in Visalia that burned down decades ago. In 1982, a friend of hers made a dollhouse to go inside the dollhouse — a scale replica of the scale replica of the house that burned down.
The smaller dollhouse is finished, but Taplin has been tinkering with the bigger one for over 40 years. Because when you ask her how you know a dollhouse is finished, she’ll tell you, “It never is.”
If you go
The Elegant Dollhouse
Address: 1120 Fulton Ave., Arden Arcade
Hours: noon to 5 p.m. daily
Website: sacramento-dollhouse-shop.com
This story was originally published September 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
