How an interior designer created her fantasy project in miniature

Although the design of the house became a testing ground for schemes Avery would love to do in real life, there were some key differences in conceptualising how a doll's house would work. “When you're in a house, you're only really in one room at a time,” she says, “whereas looking at this doll's, we wanted it to make sure that it felt balanced when you're looking at the full house from a distance. ”It had to draw you in and make an impact with colour and scale. It was kind of a mind bender to get there, but we did."

Sourcing for the house was one of the most fun parts of the project. A few pieces are actual doll's house furniture from Etsy, but Avery and her team had to use their ingenuity for much of the decoration. Samples from textile houses make up the wallpaper and flooring: for example, an approximation of stone tiles in many rooms was achieved by using Elitis' palm-fibre-inspired ‘Matières Végétales' wallcovering as flooring. “If you used this in a real house it would read very small scale and textural, but in a doll's house it looked to me like the stones of ancient Rome,” laughs Avery. Fun pieces of costume jewellery by Kendra Scott became light fittings, and column-shaped candlesticks became actual exterior columns. The pictures on the walls are largely by Picasso (Avery pictured her demigod couple as patrons of the artist), ingeniously cut from an exhibition catalogue, while a postcard of the Acropolis glued to a window stood in for the imagined view.

The walls in the living room are covered in Porter Teleo's ‘Fluid Tones’ wallcovering in FT13, while the sofa is upholstered in Lee Jofa's ‘Pulitzers Pride’ in seafoam. The curtains are Manuel Canovas' ‘Fiorella’ in tilleul.

Avery became a one-woman workshop for making window dressings and re-upholstering furniture, staying up until 2am with her sewing machine making tiny blinds and bed testers, but she was also ably assisted by partners from her regular design life. Benjamin Moore contributed the paint, and Austin-based construction company Growler Domestics helped with removing part of the middle of the house to make the courtyard and installing new interior windows to overlook it. Local plasterer Hector Vasquez rendered the exterior and parts of the interior in a ‘Roman Clay’ plaster to give the sense of a Mediterranean villa.

The rooms are packed with imagination, and part of the joy of making the doll's house was putting into practice some schemes that Avery has never quite managed to convince a client to take on. “I've pitched a Tiffany Blue room a couple of times with no takers,” she remarks, “but here I was able to show that it works in the balance of the design – it was a fun way to say, ‘see, I can do this and make it work’. It was a really great way to experiment with colour and pattern and texture and ceiling wallpaper – all those things that are beyond budgetary reach most of the time. And in fact I would love to replicate in large scale any room that we designed in this doll's house.”

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