Dolls House Theatre Columns and Scale

Both the Akron and Drury Lane designs tick almost every box for my theatre. However, their architecture does not incorporate proper columns. You see, both theatres have columns or pillars in their plans but they are in the wrong style or time-frame.

My design hinges on the columns being right because 1) The proscenium arch and boxes are to be supported on them and 2) the look of the model depends on them being to scale. Of course I could make the columns myself by using various time consuming methods but I wanted something relatively quickly and that I could easily modify which would ultimately save time.

7" and 10" Cake Stands

After a few weeks of head scratching I couldn’t believe my luck when out of desperation I did a search on Ebay for 'pillar'. The search provided several hundred results for cake stands and cake pillars. Yes, the ones you find on wedding cakes! Carefully looking at their proportions and dimensions (they were available in 6", 7" 10" and 13") I had finally found the kind of thing I was looking for.

It appeared that 10” and 7” pillars were the best and at only £6.00 for FOUR they came in at an absolute snip!  Not only did they look good but could be painted, guilded too and easily cut as they are made of soft plastic. But now came the hard part; figuring out the theatre scale based on the actual column size.

• A 10” column translated to 20ft in 1:24th scale. That means 1" = 2 feet.  1:24th is the smaller of the two dolls house scales and accessories in this scale are limited. It is not a very parctical scale for our purpose too and it would make the columns look disproportioned to the dolls.
• A 10” column translated in 1:12th scale however, the larger of the two Dolls House scales, would appear well proportioned, with a little bit of licence. 1:12th is the most popular of all dolls house scales and accessories are plentiful. 1:12th scale is 1" = 1 foot.

I had finally found my columns and a workable (if large) scale. I could also buy accessories from dolls house manufacturers and the size wouldn’t be so small as to make it hard to build, or see if you’re human audience member! I later found out, because I'm a bit slow on this kind of thing, that 1:12th is the film industry standard model scale. Perhaps I should have asked around a bit more, hey?

It was finally time to start designing on the computer. The bit I like the best if I'm honest. My day job is a professional web designer and so I am used to getting my hands dirty on a PC. You may have wondered who built this web site? Yes, you've guessed it!. So, lets now take a look at what it took to pull this all togther on a desktop computer.