Fondation Tanagra - Art Mode Culture - The Lala House

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The Lala House

an Authentic 19th-century
Family Doll's House

From the outside

The house is a big structure, almost 2 meters high (precisely 1,95 m) and 1,20 meters long and 48 centimeters wide. It has many architectural details both inside and out. It has its original paint and has an elaborate trim of wood with unusual bead motif. The emerald lacquered door is also elaborately trimmed and has a substantial wood and brass knocker as well as a plaque in brass, with no inscription on it. The house is divided in two parts, so you can either open the upper part and see the formal and private rooms or the bottom which reveals the kitchen, the pantry and dining room. It is standing on a short wooden base which might have been part of a table whose legs were shortened. It has a drawer on the side which is rather difficult to open and now, not used for anything tough over the years we used it to store extra things and furniture for the house.

The exterior of the house is architecturally accurate and could be the facade of a real house. The top of the house is enhanced with a decorative device in carved wood, a frontispiece displaying a banister (balustrade) with a crest insert in the middle. The lower portion of the house has crossed bars in the French Directoire style and you can imagine the builder(s) of this house had some interest in several classic styles since the resulting effect is a pastiche style, in itself very much in the taste of the 19th-century architecture.

The back of the house is also very interesting with its corbelled constructed upper part, an architectural detail often seen on houses overlooking a river as well as in old European cities, notably medieval, where streets were very narrow. The paint is bright yellow which is chipped in some parts showing an older grey coat but we left it this way. The contrasting tones of brown, bright yellow and emerald green altogether evoke wealthy houses from Saint Petersburg in Russia, Eastern Europe but also from Austria and Italy.

Inside the Lala House

When we open the double doors, we can only be mesmerized by the lusciousness of it. I always like to open the house in two steps, first the top, take a pause to admire the rooms in a general view, and then open the bottom doors. One also can notice the interesting difference of height in the rooms of each different level. There is something odd in the fact that the top floor - where the bedrooms are - has the highest ceilings and that the reception rooms on the first floor have the lowest ones. We have wondered if this house was initially made with a superposition of different box houses, which would explain the differences of scales, notably for the doors. Strangely enough, these differences of scale are not perceptible from the outside, where all the windows are harmoniously proportioned. It is one of the particularities of this house, which does not have any special architectural logic, as it also does not have a staircase and no commodities, such as early bathrooms. But this probably was not considered important by the maker of the house, everyone knows that old-fashioned fairies who live in there at night don’t need staircases or bathtubs!

The house revealing its full splendor

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