THROUGH the double front doors is a twostorey atrium with light pouring in through the glass roof.

On the first floor the master bedroom is surrounded by a wrap-around balcony while downstairs the lounge has large doors looking onto a secluded patio.

It looks like the kind of ultramodern home that fans of aspirational television drool over on Grand Designs.

It’s the dream house designed and built by Leanne Bartlett and it would be her perfect home – if only it was 12 times bigger.

This perfect-looking home is, in fact, a doll’s house.

It is one of a series of modern houses created by Leanne and currently cluttering her very nice but rather more modest family home in Locks Heath.

Leanne, 39, loved doll’s houses and all things miniature as a child but it was her husband who got her back into them some six years ago – as an outlet for her passion for doing up houses and interior decoration.

During her 20s, Leanne moved nine times in as many years – buying a house, renovating it and moving onto the next project.

In fact Leanne’s husband Nigel got so good at building, having remodelled the interiors of their houses, that the former car builder and postman became a professional builder and now co-owns his own firm.

“Every time I finished making a house look nice I wanted to move again!” she laughs.

“I liked the project side of it.”

Her husband’s plan to divert her interior design efforts were successful – they have lived in their current home for nine years.

But as their house has now been taken over by doll’s houses – they even had three foot added to an extension to accommodate one of the larger models – he may wish he had encouraged her creativity in a different direction.

Leanne started out building a dollhouse from a flat pack kit. But one was not enough.

“My husband bought me a really big Tudor house dollhouse which was supposed to be my last ever doll’s house but once I had completed that I had itchy fingers to start something else!”

As well as building the structure of the doll’s houses, Jane decorates them internally.

From the outset she personalised her houses, adding rooms, changing front doors and so on. It was when she made significant alterations to a gigantic 1930’s style doll’s house that she realised that she could probably make her own.

“More and more modern miniature things for doll’s houses were becoming available,” says Leanne.

“I bought a miniature satellite dish but you can’t put that on a Victorian dollhouse. I was looking for a modern one and realised that you can’t really get one so I decided to make them myself.”

Leanne bought herself a large sheet of MDF and began cutting out her first completely handmade doll’s house. She made alterations as she went along and still prefers to build rather than designing a house on paper first.

Luckily her father, a retired aircraft engineer, was on hand to help her with some of the trickier aspects of putting the houses together.

Leanne has gone on to design, build and decorate three further designs of doll’s house, as well as a doll’s house hairdressing salon, setting up her own business: The Contemporary Home in Miniature.

She fits the work in around being a mum to two boys and running her own mobile and home-based hairdressing business.

While many of us may have played with doll’s houses as a child, Leanne says that for most adults, they are collector items rather than toys. “It’s architecture and interior design that interest me,” she explains.

“With this I can have a go at doing anything and if it fails it doesn’t matter. I make furniture and soft furnishings and I can sit at it for a couple of hours in an evening and make something. I’m a busy working mum so this way I can find the time to dedicate to creating something on a small scale. And obviously I can’t afford to buy plots of land and build these things for real!”

This seems to be a key factor in Leanne’s love of doll’s houses.

“I think it’s to live the dream that we can’t afford to have in real life,” she says. “I think that’s what’s behind it. I’d love to have a mansion but I can’t so I have a mini one.”

Although constructing and dressing doll’s houses might not be as costly as doing it for real, Leanne admits that it can be an expensive hobby – she estimates that she has spent some £10,000 on doll’s houses over the years.

But part of the attraction of modern doll’s houses is that she can create lots of the interior decorations herself.

“People seem fascinated with everyday things being recreated in miniature form.

Mine seem to appeal to a wide range of people because they aren’t chintzy.

I have my sons’ friends coming in and people like a man from the phone company the other day and they seem to love them.”

In the long run Leanne is hoping to be able to wind down her hairdressing business and concentrate on building doll’s houses.

Her current range of bespoke houses retail for £425 for the smallest model to £1395 for the largest.

“It might sound like a lot to someone who is new to the hobby but that isn’t even covering minimum wage for my time,” she says.

“It’s a hobby business at the moment but you never know,” she adds. “Someone said to me, ‘you never know, if you sell enough of these you might be able to live in one one day’!”

n For more information on The Contemporary Home in Miniature, contact leanne72@virginmedia.com, or visit thecontemporaryhomeinminiature.

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