Miniature Time Traveller Issue 1

Miniature Time Traveller Magazine Issue #1/11 www.miniaturetimetraveller.com When the builders were busy adding on a wing of our Victorian Villa inspiration struck. I will build a 12th scale New Zealand Villa! While I was cutting out 24 veranda scrolls with my jig saw I was dreaming about how to cut out 12th Scale ones. Little did I know how this project would expand. TheVictorians When I started this project – building a miniature Victorian villa -I had to ask myself “What did the Victorians like?” Even to begin to answer that question one must put the terms "Victorian" and "Victorians" within quotation marks twice — first because the Victorian years, which lasted from 1835 to 1903 or a few years beyond, obviously divides into three, four, or even five periods. Whereas the early part of Victoria's reign saw interest in a medieval or Gothic Revival in all aspects of architecture and design, much of the mid- and late- Victorian period was a time of the cluttered look that most of us associate with the term "Victorian." Then, from the 1880s onward, a series of reactions against High Victorian taste took place — Aestheticism, Art Nouveau, Japonaise, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Celtic Revival and the Liberty Style and finally Art Deco which reached its height much later, in the 1930s and '40s. Therefore, when anyone talks about "Victorian taste," we have to find out to which part of Victoria's reign they refer. Second and equally important, Victorian taste varied widely according to their social class and the not-always-closely-related matter of economic status. To begin with, many members of the nobility and land-owning gentry, who lived in homes their families, had occupied for centuries, found themselves surrounded by Elizabethan, Jacobean, and eighteenth- century furnishings, and unless they were self- consciously interested in contemporary taste, they were often unlikely to replace perfectly good furniture or silver, however old and out-of-fashion, with any examples of new taste. A conservative, prosperous, but not particularly wealthy member of the squire- achy had no fashionable furnishings. Similarly, members of the working classes, farm workers, and unemployed poor, who together made up far more than half of the Victorian population, did not have the resources to furnish their homes with properly Victorian things. The early settlers who arrived in New Zealand (1853- 1900 onward) were bringing their Victorian heritage with them, frozen in the time of their leaving. Any future evolving of the Victorian décor, in New Zealand, was the result of settlers returning to Europe on trips and bringing back ideas and visions of William Morris wallpaper and Japonaise furniture. If you are aged between 60—95 years old you would remember a childhood still greatly influenced by the Victorian age. I lived in my Grandparents large villa built around 1906. It had incredible plaster work on the ceilings, ceiling roses and plinths supporting an archway half way down a long hallway that separated the servants quarters from the family back then. I had a dormitory all to myself. I spent a lot of time gazing at the ornate plasterwork in the hall and the formal lounge. Architecture The Victorian décor and architecture in New Zealand differs from the British heritage in many ways. Where the majority of Victorian homes in Britain were built of brick – a direct result of the Industrial Revolution, the homes in early New Zealand were built of wood. Extensive native forests made this possible. The early Victorian cottages and villas were framed in native Rimu or Kauri timber. They were clad on the outside with Rimu weatherboards and lined inside, firstly with rough sawn Rimu planking then a layer of woven flax ‘scrim’. Wallpaper was glued over this linen base and subsequent (continued overleaf) The original life sized villa before enlarging Building a Victorian Villa - A journey through history