KEY POINTS:
An abandoned doll's house carries all the melancholy of a discarded photo album. Who did it belong to? What miniature dramas were acted out within its tiny walls and can we detect a remnant of its former owner's spirit?
On display in the vault at Objectspace is the doll's house that Nora West was given 57 years ago as a child in England. It had been left to deteriorate under a Waiheke bach and when West approached a carpenter and asked him to restore it, he laughed.
She was very sad - "it encapsulated my entire English heritage".
But in 2005, her four adult children schemed up an elaborate and clandestine plot to salvage the severely dilapidated house in time for her 60th birthday. This was to become Nora West's life as a house.
Eldest daughter Amy acted as the project manager. She was aware of needing to do something significant for her mother's birthday and remembered an old Vogue article she had seen about famous women and their doll's houses.
Years earlier when she had been stressed over her encroaching School Certificate exams she fantasised about doing up the doll's house as a way of lulling herself to sleep.
But a perfect period reproduction seemed too dry - then it came to her that she could construct four rooms representing different epochs of her mother's life: her English country childhood bedroom, her London 60s hippy bedroom, her Cotswold kitchen with nappies airing over the Aga and her current Grey Lynn living room. Upstairs in the attic were three empty rooms left for Nora to fill.
"We came to it as a ruin," says Amy. "We knew its entire history and were able to go back and rebuild it."
It was important that they were giving it back to her on her 60th birthday; they hoped they could bring back some of her childhood and the luxury of time to play.
Many family members and old friends were enrolled in this collective project but one of the key people was Amy's brother, Henry, the main building contractor who also kept a superb photographic progress report.
Amy repeatedly uses the word "soothing" in describing the implementation of the project.
It was a dream world to escape to, noting that after 1973 it was also her own history. She took pleasure from conceptualising the rooms and transforming banal objects into other roles such as a makeup compact into a bedroom mirror and a cocktail umbrella into a 60s parasol.
"We've secured it as something that will be handed down in the family. More generations will see it now."
Nora wept as the house was unveiled at a surprise morning tea. "The best thing it did for me was it made sense of my life, all my seemingly random changes neatly tied together under one roof."
There is another undersized house in the small gallery which belongs to Penny Milne. It is a charming period piece, built circa 1920, an object that became a companion to Milne, who as an asthmatic child spent a lot of time infirm and alone in a sun porch.
The occupants of the house are also on display, complete with their tiny beautifully crafted outfits that she made by hand. For Milne, the doll's house magic came from making up little stories and plays for her characters.
We have all fallen under the spell of a doll's house at some time, whether it was reading about Katherine Mansfield's awestruck little Kezia uttering, "I seen the little lamp", the beautiful doll's house that Beatrix Potter's two bogan mice Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb set about wrecking or postcards of Queen Mary's architecturally designed masterpiece.
We loom over these small structures like Alice or Gulliver but without the anxiety. Briefly, we can take charge. As the French philosopher Bachelard wrote, "Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness."
What: My Life as a House: Collectors Nora West and Penny Milne
Where and when: Objectspace, 8 Ponsonby Rd, to March 3
Also at Objectspace: The faux group show; Albino Wood in Blue Ribbon, faux jewellery by Yasmin Dubrau
