This Modern Life does: Funkis Dollhouse

We’re so excited so many of you loved the video of us decorating our Ferm Living Funkis Dollhouse! As promised, here is some more information on how we made it happen: our inspiration, the products we used, and what we made ourselves…

Our original starting point was the dollhouse I created a couple of years ago with my sister, Sami. We previously decorated the Lundby dollhouse as a present for my daughter Dixie, and you can find the blog post for that project HERE.  The Lundby dollhouse was basically created as a miniature version of my own house, and we created lots of teeny-tiny This Modern Life products that I have full-scale in my own home! This time we wanted to create something even bigger and better, but still kept the feel of my own house.

In our previous Lundby Dollhouse project, we recreated the wallpapers we sell online and scaled them down to dollhouse size. (If you email our lovely customer services manager Raz at hello@thismodernlife.co.uk she will be more than happy to send the PDFs over to you to print at home!) This time round, we used gift wrapping paper that we sell on This Paper Life, and simply cut it down to size. You can shop our gift wrapping papers HERE.

The furniture seen in both dollhouses was a mix of 1970s-esque pieces we sourced on ebay, and Lundby furniture. The washing machine and cooker actually came from my Mum Alli’s own 1960’s dollhouse! I fashioned the Sebra cot out of foam board and paper earbud sticks, and the Christmas tree (a.k.a cactus borrowed from my Granny!) pot is a Buddy + Bear egg cup that you can buy in our online store. We repainted most of the furniture (which was 1970s orange & red;)) and accessories to fit our real-life products using non-toxic, VOC-free paint from Lakeland, which you can buy sample pots of HERE.

Most of the accessories were ‘repurposed’ from Sylvanian families or made by us. We hand-made all of the cushions and covers, and decorated them with fabric pens and paint. The presents under the ‘Christmas tree’ are rubbers that have been cut up and decorated with a Sharpie, as has the little piece of material that acts as our adventure rug in the nursery and the two other circular rugs.

My Mum used Fimo clay for a lot of the accessories that we needed to create ourselves, including the Miffy Lamp, Ball Pit and Wooden Building Blocks. This took time, but was great fun! The posters are simply scaled-down versions of the posters we sell online (shop the full-sized versions HERE), and the sparkly garland above the ‘twas the night before Christmas’ banner is literally the full-size Meri Meri glitter garland cut down to the length we needed! The ‘twas the night before christmas’ banner itself is made up of little letter stickers from the local art shop, which we coloured in black. Living in the dollhouse are our lovely wooden Pebble Dolls, available in three different designs. The baby doll (baby Bly) was made by Alli from Fimo. We made the little tipi shelf from a piece of craft wood from the local art shop and painted the colour on. 

The whole look was finished with our favourite Ferm Living copper star wall stickers, and some snow glitter flakes from local company Artscape (also the Fimo) to make it that little bit more festive! 

I won’t lie, decorating the dollhouse was a labour of love and creating the furniture and accessories was time-consuming. But it was such a fun and rewarding project, and we are SO pleased with the end result. I would absolutely recommend doing up your own dollhouse for a personal and timeless playtime favourite that you will keep for years to come. Hopefully our project will have inspired you, and made it that little bit easier to start your own! 

This featured Funkis Dollhouse will be up for grabs in a competition later this year (sadly furniture and accessories not included!) and we have them available to buy in the run up to Christmas. We also sell other dollhouse versions here. 

If you have any more questions about our dollhouse just send us a message on Instagram or Facebook, or feel free to email us at hello@thismodernlife.co.uk. And if you do get started on your own dream dollhouse, don’t forget to send us pictures! We would love to see your creations and will feature them on social media with your permission.

Lots of love, 

Suzanne and the TML team x