Flever Dollhouse Miniature DIY House Kits

What a Flever dollhouse miniature kit is

A dollhouse kit from this section is a building rather than a scene. You assemble a facade with windows and a door, a staircase that actually climbs, two or three floors of furnished rooms and, on several models, a garden or a shopfront on the ground level. These are the models we photograph for the front of the shop, because they are the ones that make people stop.

They are also the slowest things we sell. Plan on twenty to forty hours, a dedicated corner of a table and a month of evenings. The lighting is split into several circuits so that the shop sign, the stairwell and the upstairs lamp can glow at once, and the booklet walks each wire through the walls before the walls go on.

The design work is where a miniature house kit is won or lost. Our drawings start from a real building — a seaside guest house, a village bakery, a Victorian corner shop — and we keep cutting parts until the proportions read right at this scale. Then come the small boxes of loose parts: the garden flowers, the crockery, the books, the tiny market produce on the ground-floor stand.

Finished, a Flever dollhouse is a piece of furniture in its own right. It wants a clear shelf, a side table or the top of a low bookcase, somewhere it can be lit in the evening and looked at from the front rather than squeezed between things. Several of ours are built as a Christmas project and then kept out all year, which we take as a compliment.

We would not hand one of these to a first-time builder. Build a room kit first, learn how our glue behaves and how the tabs lock, and then come back for the house. Nothing here is hard; there is simply a great deal of it, and the craft is in not hurrying.

What comes in the box

• Laser-cut sheets for the facade, floors, staircase and roof of the whole house.
• Every room's dollhouse furniture, down to the crockery and the books.
• Two or more LED circuits with battery packs, so rooms can be lit separately.
• Garden parts on the models that have one: flowers, fencing, paving, a stand or a bench.
• A thick photographed booklet that builds the house floor by floor.

Choosing between them

1. Measure the shelf before you choose — these are the largest kits we make, and the finished house wants to be seen from the front rather than wedged in a gap.
2. Decide whether you want a home or a shop: the shop models give you a lit sign and a street side, the houses give you more rooms.
3. Count your evenings honestly. If a month of them is not available, build a miniature room kit now and keep the dollhouse for the winter.

Read before you glue

• Your First Flever Dollhouse Miniature Kit — How to Start
• Wiring the LED Lights in a Flever Dollhouse Miniature Kit
• Tools for a Flever Dollhouse Miniature Kit — Glue and Tweezers
• Where to Display a Finished Flever Dollhouse Miniature Kit