Small Houses With Big Stories

The Whiteladies House looks a bit like the younger cousin of Le Corbusier’s concrete Villa Savoye, completed five years prior just outside of Paris. Both are stark white, simultaneously sloping and angular. The former debuted in 1936 at The Building Center in London. Not just its blueprint, or a rendering—the whole house. It fit on top of a table.

Whiteladies is a dollhouse exactingly built by Moray Thomas, who outfitted it with shrunken versions of contemporary furniture, and lively, colorful paintings reminiscent of pictures by Gauguin and Matisse. The cream-colored house and its décor reflected the life-sized zeitgeist of the period between the wars. A zippy sports car, tennis court, and swimming pool—with bathers poised to dive—flag this as a home for people who appreciate leisure, and “excellently illustrate modern social habits and their architectural expression,” according to the museum’s 1937 annual report.