Wooden Dollhouses Site

The Munich Baby House of Duke Albert V

In 1557-1558, Duke Albert V of Bavaria had a Baby House created. This project involved a considerable expenditure. Albert was Duke of Bavaria from 1550 to 1579, and probably gave detailed directions as to how the house was to be designed and furnished. The dollhouse, as a result, was a replica of the house of a Southern German prince from that time. This is the earliest known example of a dollhouse, and has since been considered to be a precursor to the dollhouses that have been produced since.

Albert V commissioned Jacob Sandtner to carve scale models of his five residences ten years later. These residences were located in the towns of Straubing, Landshut, Munich, Ingolstadt, and Burghausen. The Baby House was then followed by replicas of towns in which it might well have stood.

Sometime between 1563 and 1567, William Egkl created a separated building in the Old Yard in Munich to house the Duke’s cabinet. In this museum, the five model towns and the Baby House were displayed, and are listed and described in detail in the 1598 inventory of the decal cabinet.

Like the five model towns, the Munich House was not designed to be a children’s toy, but was created as a cabinet piece to be looked at and admired. This house was a completed house, which faithfully presented the architecture and furnishing of a princely dwelling. The five towns themselves showed the general layout and full exterior details of every building.

Many craftsmen contributed to building the Munich House, some of them were local, while others were from distant places. Some of the craftsmen or of the court joiner Wolf Greiss, the locksmiths Hans Klein and Kaspar Bauer and the painters Hans Ostendorfer and Hans Schӧpfer.

The miniature dollhouses were produced to show what possessions one held, and how one had lived, just as Albert V had hoped to have done. The Baby Houses were definitely not children’s toys; that is, toys as they have come to be known in the nineteenth century – things that were designed for children to keep them entertained and occupied. Back in those days, children were regard as small, imperfect adults who need to be taught how to conduct themselves for an adult life.

The term ‘Dockenhaus’ (Baby House) was considered, many years later, to indicated that the 1558 Munich Hose was a toy that had been created for the Duke’s children, but this wasn’t the case. It wasn’t until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the term dollhouse or Baby House began to mean a toy.

In 1674, the Munich residence was burned down, and the 1558 Munich House was, unfortunately, lost. The detailed description provided in the inventory of the decal cabinet (a document written in 1598 by Johan Baptist Fickler, Court Councillor to the Duke), however, provided and excellent picture of the Baby House and its contents. This has helped preserve the memory of the Munich Baby House Duke Albert V to this day.