In Praise of a Useless Doll House

As the sun is out at last, my small medieval Swiss town of Stein am Rhein is buzzing with life again. Known for its Christmas market and the deep blues of the Rhein riverside, Stein am Rhein is dead between January and March. Very few shops and cafes remain open year-round. The messengers of spring revival here aren’t only birds and snowdrops, but also cyclists. Whenever they descend on the town, you know the tourist high season is around the corner. With that, charity shops reopen as well.

Charity shops here, known as brocki, are very special. At first glance, they are full of the most useless old things, like handmade cow collars, embroidered tablecloths and curtains, stained mirrors, wood carvings, sun-faded paintings, scratched-out ceramic plates, and old wooden cribs where stray cats take daily naps. Brocki smells of thick, heavy dust, clutter, and generations of old, unique home perfume collected through the years. At a closer look, each of these random items carries a certain shadow–a shadow of human agency, time, and effort dedicated to making and carrying them through one’s lifetime.

There is one group of objects that recurrently appears in every brocki in this part of Europe–the doll house, known in German as Puppenhaus. Having grown up in the early 2000s, my idea of a doll's living space is a bright pink plastic Barbie house full of soulless plastic items with stickers to fool you into thinking the Barbie gets a real TV channel. Now, puppenhauses are something completely different.

Carefully constructed over multiple floors, puppenhauses look incredibly real. They have  flattering wallpaper with diverse patterns, ranging from flowers to stripes, as well as mirrors, reading chairs, small lamps, baths, and even vanity tables. The materials used are different as well: copper, leather, glass, and silver. Most of these objects are no taller than a cherry tomato, yet they carry the precision and craftsmanship of a top-tier studio. Their utility seems questionable to a modern mind; it might even provoke a widespread fear of clutter. But their beauty is undeniable. These doll houses carry a special type of weight that is incredibly rare in the current era.

Perhaps a common mistake someone could make when looking at Germanic doll houses at first is assuming they were made for children. That was, indeed, my impression. I played with Barbies, so I thought girls in the 17th century played with them. Except my Barbies were exactly like the Barbies of other girls at school, not to mention their identical houses, whereas each and every doll in brocki seemed specially handmade for each child. Was I, an almost 30-year-old millennial, jealous of these almost ancient dolls that often didn’t even have perfectly parallel eyelids?

My jealousy was short-lived when I learned that the dolls were made not so much for use but as decorations. The only purpose they were ever meant to serve is beauty. Their utility was indulgence in productive leisure, known in the Roman times as otium. For generations, Europeans carried that tradition into everyday life. 

Doll houses are just one example of how we can fill the void of boredom. Throughout preindustrial Europe, there have been many more. The French women made sophisticated outfits for their dolls, Ukrainian peasants embroidered shirts, and Italians built nativity theatres. Where 17th-century Europeans found boredom as a channel to human agency and creativity and embraced its discomfort, our never-ending pursuit of quick dopamine, the efficiency culture, and hustle prevents us from embracing it. We rarely hear stories of people saying something outrageous, like I was bored, so I carved out a miniature mirror that no one can use. Nowadays, unless something is productive, the effort to make it becomes negated.

Pre-Industrial Revolution middle-class German and Dutch women would spend countless hours of their leisure time carving, melting, shaping, dressing, sewing, and caring for dolls and their surroundings. They imagined the doll's bath time, the reading chair incline, bathrobe, and kitchen utensils the size of a sesame seed. There was a monumental amount of work behind these tiny objects, which is evident in the specific, heavy shadow they carry, something no modern machine could ever achieve. In charity shops, it's hard to know whether all these pieces of furniture were originally part of the same houses, or whether a shopkeeper just used items sent from different parts of Switzerland to put this presentation together. If anything, it makes these items even more fascinating. Each and every one of them carries the history and weight of human agency. Who made this changing table? What was the light like in their room when she was carving this furniture? Did their hand slip on the edge, and that’s why the changing table looks slightly wobbly? But above all, how did they have so many free hours in the day to create it from scratch?

Modern productivity culture has, by and large, pushed out objects that don’t carry efficiency, like these tiny dolls, and has also understated the detailed individual effort and human agency needed to make them. It is much harder to make a miniature sofa than a huge one, just as it is harder to write a shorter essay than a longer one. I would know, going on about a doll house for the last 600 words!​

Every generation likes to think that they are at the peak of human progress and dismiss the past decades as dark ages. It is in many ways true. Nearly all houses in Europe nowadays have central heating to keep us warm in winter, lamps with unlimited light to help us write in the middle of a dark night, and a whole array of kitchen appliances to do the work for us. A Victorian housewife could never dream of a KitchenAid or a dishwasher and the free time they bring. We have come so far since the wave of the Industrial Revolution roiled every aspect of our lives, and yet our homes look bland, our minds are full of TikTok videos, and our limbs barely ever hurt from creative exertion. We have a lot more free time than an 18th-century peasant, but do we have a lot more individual agency in using it? 

Where our ancestors would spend six hours making a clay mug to decorate their kitchen, we are spending six hours on our phones every day. A very human emotion of boredom has become one of the most undesirable nowadays–we leave ourselves no space to experience it. TV is the central meeting spot for most families every evening. Many have dinner while watching a show, and then retire to their bedrooms to scroll before bed. We scroll on the toilet, on the train, even in the supermarket queue. I have recently learned that I, for instance, pick up my phone over 150 times a day, which is roughly every nine minutes. 

We are staring into the void of our phone and TV, and it’s staring back at us. To be bored has become synonymous with a lack of something, or, worse, the fear of missing out. But boredom is an essential element of human agency. It is out of boredom that great ideas can be born. Martin Heidegger spoke of 'profound boredom' not as a void to be escaped, but as a silent fog that allows the world to finally show itself to us. In that fog, the average preindustrial European didn’t find ready-made entertainment; they encountered a toolshed and a brush. Boredom carries a sense of struggle, not physical, but a mental one. Victorians had to light whale oil to see the canvas and paint. It was a conscious human effort to fill the void and to engage with it—which, of course, wasn’t always available at all times to everyone then, but deemed essential.

The older generations of Europeans exercised a lot more creative freedom in their homes and lives. The individual, their play, and their vision for beauty were the sole masters. Even the least free of all Europeans, peasants, chose creative freedom when they could surrender to uniformity and conformity. A prime example of this is Ukrainian embroidered shirts, which take countless hours to make, as well as many other traditional costumes in Europe, which have now all but disappeared. Why make a time consuming detailed shirt if you can just stitch fabric together, or even buy a machine-made one?

Every visit to brocki makes me feel like I'm revisiting someone’s old house. Someone, whose presence and agency are felt in every single object, someone dusty but well alive. I am in no way trying to romanticise the past, but I wonder, however, if we could go back in time and offer a German housewife a machine-made doll house, or worse, an AI-generated image of that house, would she take it? She would perhaps delight at the thought of it, and like a toddler tasting chocolate for the first time, she would jump on it. This ready-made creation would act as a dummy, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, to contain her discomfort at boredom. But would she be happier from this momentary sugar spike in five, ten, or twenty years? How would her life change if she abandoned the creative process and artistic agency? What would her life be like without boredom? We don’t have to imagine. We just have to look around.

Brocki are usually overflowing with objects and need to take outside space. Upon leaving a brocki, one can encounter larger objects that didn’t fit inside, like high chairs that also serve as bikes or big sun umbrellas for dolls. Many of these will never sell, as they have no utility for modern humans. But perhaps, for now, it is enough for these outrageously playful items to just sit there and remind us that there was a time when Europeans were domestic artists, wood carvers, seamstresses, and craftsmen, not just passive scrollers and consumers of machine inventions. The shadow of that agency must be well alive, hidden under decades of uniformity and scale economy, waiting for an individual to throw away generic art and pick up a brush, a piece of wood, or a needle–and begin again, slowly.