Dream House

So I was doing a little search online for color samples for a project I'm working on and happened on this little doll house.

Isn't it the most fabulous dollhouse you've ever seen!? It's a model of the house from UP. I would absolutely love to have a dollhouse like this!

If I were buying a dollhouse for Lily though, I'd probably get something more like this one:

Dollhouse/bookshelf. Practical and fun! Just enough of a house to stir the imagination. I mean, I had fun making dollhouses out of my plastic stacking end tables or baby doll bunk-beds turned upside down. I fully believe that toys shouldn't be too elaborate or they won't encourage children to be creative and come up with anything on their own. Part of what I liked most about playing with dolls was setting up their houses (I had them sprawling all around my room), making a refrigerator out of a cardboard box, a whirlpool bathtub out of the packaging for a new faucet, cutting up toilet tissue and rolling it on to a q-tip to make a tiny toilet paper roll, reusing my mom's unfinished afghan squares for their bedding... This dollhouse would be much easier to fit into a room, and you could use it for books or other storage, and easily repaint it if you updated your decor. You wouldn't be ashamed to still have this in your bedroom when you became a teenager (who still occasionally liked playing with dolls, but not openly to her friends). I wonder if there is room along the wall at the edge of Lily's bed for something like this...