Click here for a video display of Karen Willis's dollhousesDown at the end of the block, a home’s window reveals the light from an old console television set: It’s the opening credits of Mel Brooks’ 1965 comedy “Get Smart” and a freeze-frame image of bumbling crimefighter Don Adams. The room is empty except for the home’s three lazy cats, who stretch beneath a table.
In the house across the street, a scrappy white Scottish terrier stiffens at the 88th key of a baby grand piano. His mouth frames a single bark, and his plastic coat shimmers beneath fluorescent lights.
They are dollhouses of another era, crafted in multiple styles, and part of a collection amassed over half a century.
When Jim Willis lost his wife Karen two and a half years ago, he said the hardest part was wandering from room to room, seeing the many reminders of 47 years of marriage to a woman he adored.
These days, Willis finds these tiny rooms a comfort, a way of resurrecting memories of Karen, and to relish her talents, which went beyond dollhouse miniatures.
On various walls throughout the home hang just some of the 75 paintings Karen Willis created.
Brushstrokes of cats, Victorian houses with jack-o’-lanterns perched on covered porches, and a man sitting on the buckboard of a horse-drawn wagon heading down Main Street in turn-of-the-century Bonner. Detailed needlepoints, framed in wood, and half-finished craft projects that await able hands.
But it’s the antique mid-century dollhouses, collected throughout a lifetime, that connect memories, according to Willis.
“I actually come in here quite often,” he said of the downstairs bedroom that once belonged to his son, but which is now real estate to these 32 dollhouses.
In this room, four rows of shelves, wrapping the length of two walls, mimic suburban streets. The small corner closet, once a place to hang adolescent clothes, is stuffed to the hilt with cardboard boxes holding many more housefuls of the miniature furniture that breathes life into these living rooms.
“She collected all of the furniture for these houses in the places we’d go on vacation,” Willis said. “I think she has furniture from Seattle, Canada, California, Arizona, Wisconsin - from all over the place.”
What she didn’t collect on the road, she made herself.
“She hand-hooked all of the rugs in the houses - all of them,” he said shaking his head. “The bedspreads too - well, most of them anyway.”
Rugs feature thatched patches of pansies, Persian paisley, and shags well-suited to cold bathroom floors.
In the game room of a metal-roofed home on the third shelf is a pool table with scattered balls. Willis said his wife made the pool table from a common household object he couldn’t identify or remember. She then covered it in felt, crafted its six pockets, and hand-painted pool balls made from clay.
The dwellings themselves, mostly manufactured by companies Marx and Playsteel, have metal roofs with chimneys, workable doors, and all styles of window shutters. Fashioned of tin, the dwellings were first introduced by dollhouse company Marx in 1948, and feature home exteriors with intricate painted detailing of bricks, shingles and siding.
In the last 10 years of her life, Karen Willis belonged to a local club called “Montana Minis” that met in Missoula on the third Tuesday of every month. Membership in a club concerned with all things tiny meant Karen Willis didn’t stop at just hooking rugs and bedspreads. She also made small paintings and books for the homes: One-inch square classics “Jane Eyre” and the Holy Bible share shelves with issues of Highlights children’s magazine, and a dog-eared copy of M.A. Taylor Hat Emporium for Fine Hats catalog, featuring two bonneted felines on its cover.
“In the last few years, she reduced the photos of real book covers down on the computer and then made books,” Willis said. Karen glued covers to bits of foam board, he said, and scored edges with a fingernail to simulate the pages of a book.
A copy of Jo Coudert’s “Seven Cats and the Art of Living” - the tale of fictional cats Kate, Poppy, Chester, Socksie, Trot, Bitty and Sweet William - props lazily on a bookshelf. It’s just one of a thousand reminders that Karen Willis adored house cats.
Back downstairs, just opposite the homes, photographs of three and four generations of family cover one wall. Willis points to his two granddaughters Jamie, 17, and Jessie, 8, both of whom will inherit this minute legacy.
“I’ll keep them here for now,” he said of the dollhouses, “but they’ll get them when I pass on.”
The two granddaughters have always admired the collection, he said, but always knew not to play with it.
It includes a plastic family of four, sitting motionless and smiling on a set of bright yellow furniture.
Willis remembers the day, two decades ago, that he and his wife stumbled across the whole set on a trip to Minnesota, and had purchased it for far less than its worth.
The plastic mother held a plastic infant close, and Willis looked across to the wall to a faded photo of a little girl with perfect Kewpie-doll hair, and pink satin shoes.
“That was Karen as a baby,” he said.
Reporter Lori Grannis may be reached at 523-5251 or lori.grannis@lee.net.
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