PICTURES: 'Home comfort' - dolls house built aboard a boat in the Highlands is an absolute beauty
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An incredibly detailed doll’s house gave its creator a valuable focus during lockdown.
Retired engineer, theatre manager and lecturer Ian Howker (74) lives aboard a houseboat in Seaport Marina at Muirtown in Inverness and said: “I am not very good at blowing my own trumpet, but people tell me it is spectacular.
“The doll’s house is fairly big – it has two bedrooms and at the moment it is mounted on top of whisky barrel on a lazy Susan, which helped me turn it round when I was working on it.
“I have been making smaller models for some time and developed this technique for simulating stone.
“I was looking for a more substantial property to model and came across a photograph of a house that was built in 1880 that I thought was interesting.
“The model is based on the Station Master’s House on the Midland Railway’s Settle to Carlisle railway line.
“There were several houses of the same design at different stations but built in different stone – sandstone, red sandstone – and this one at Dent Head, the highest station in England, which was made of limestone quarried locally.”
Not interested in producing a slavish copy, Mr Howker said: “For practical reasons, I made some alterations from the original design.
“The real house has a large outbuilding which housed the outside toilet, fuel store and soil store, and a walled area which I presume was for hanging out the washing.
“To include all this would have made a very impracticable model due to its size so I ‘modernised it’ and converted what the original architect’s plan describes as the wash house into the kitchen and the original third bedroom into the bathroom, hence the fireplace.
“The interior is now probably more in keeping with the 1960s because it has electricity and hot and cold running water.
“But that allowed me to retain the kitchen range and a fireplace in the bathroom, which was originally a third bedroom.
“It wasn’t the lockdown that started me thinking about doing it, but it certainly focused the mind and kept me sane.”
Altogether Mr Howker estimates he spent between 600 and 700 hours working on the doll’s house.
“It will be up for sale shortly as, unfortunately, it takes up much of my workshop and the pleasure for me was in the construction,” he said.
“The difficulty, however, is going to be finding a home big enough to accommodate it!”
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