Spring 2005
Bruin Walk

Downsizing

It took Leslie Evans 15 years to complete his miniature German dollhouse — longer than it takes to build most full-sized homes. But few of those homes ever receive the kind of loving attention to detail that Evans lavished on his tiny inn, with its 14 rooms, several walkways, mezzanine and balcony. Peer into the tiny windows and you can see the kitchen and dining hall, a library, a bedroom for the innkeeper and his family, a fancy guest room and a tower with a game room. It also has a garret for a student and beds tucked into three little alcoves in the attic, where the impecunious would stay the night.

“If it were a full-sized house,” says Evans, the Web site and publications manager for UCLA’s International Institute, “my guess is that it would be about 4,000 square feet.”

Modeled after Altes Haus, a still-functioning restaurant built in 1368 on the edge of the Rhine River in Bacharach, Germany, Evans’ masterpiece is 5 feet tall, 2 1/2 feet wide and 3 1/2 feet deep. The most tedious task? Hand- gluing 3,000 tiny shingles to the roof.

Evans’ dollhouse is proudly displayed in the bay window of the home he shares with his wife, Jennifer. He has no immediate plans to start on a second one, however. “There’s no other place to put anything that big in our house,” he says.

by Wendy Soderburg '82