CRAFT STORY | EUROPE | THE NETHERLANDS | MULTI-MEDIA

The Mouse Mansion

In Karina Schaapman’s extraordinary hand-crafted Mouse Mansion in Amsterdam, creatures better known for scuttling along the canals are granted a meticulously ordered world of their own. The mice may be toys, but their habitat exists far beyond a child's imagination, thanks to the work and commitment of this unique and visionary maker. Emma Becque and Isabel Bronts take a tour of this miniature Dutch marvel. 

Step through a doorway barely an inch tall, and you enter a house furnished with curtains the size of sewing needles and shelves stacked with paper-thin books. Over two decades in Amsterdam, artist and author Karina Schaapman’s Mouse Mansion has grown into a fully realised interior at mouse scale, where measured detail accumulates into something far from small.

The "never-ending story", as Karina calls it, is a project structured as a sequence of interconnected rooms. The cardboard city's architectural logic was conceived with the same rigour as that of a full-scale interior, despite its reduced size. Schaapman traces this compression back to childhood.

“I found a safe space in such fantasies, even when my experience of the world was tinged by a combination of deep affection and precariousness,” she says, linking the work to a background shaped by instability and to a project she defines in terms of “everything I missed as a child: safety, warmth and a sense of belonging.”

Today, visitors of all ages queue outside the original Mouse Mansion, housed behind an unassuming shopfront on Amsterdam’s Muntplein. The pocket-sized gallery occupies a series of slanting back rooms within a former 18th-century Dutch flag maker’s workshop, where the miniature city unfolds across dozens of interiors. Each space is furnished by hand: curtains the size of a sewing pin are stitched with trim, staircases are assembled piece by piece, and shelves are lined with paper-thin books, bound and inscribed at a microscopic scale.

“I want to show children they can create worlds from almost anything they can find,” Schaapman explains. Material sourcing is treated as daily fieldwork with the artist spending hours at Amsterdam’s Noordermarkt scanning for discarded bottle caps, fragments of fabric and overlooked ephemera, supplementing these finds with cardboard and old newspapers gathered closer to home.

“She told me stories about her homeland as we lay together.” Those nightly rituals offered continuity during a period marked by instability and displacement, and it was within this intimate, imagined space that the artist first understood storytelling as a way to move beyond immediate circumstance.

In Karina's studio, shelves are stuffed with pint-size trinkets and recycled textiles awaiting transformation as accessories in her next scene. © Isabel Bronts. 

Schaapman’s early childhood was marked by instability and periods of loss. “My mother joined a travelling Dutch circus and fell in love with its director,” she explains, recalling a brief interval in which a sense of community emerged within its nomadic and expressive world. The collapse of the circus, followed by her mother’s illness and tragic death, left Schaapman alone at a young age. These experiences do not surface explicitly within The Mouse Mansion, but they inform its spatial logic, shaping how rooms connect, retreat and accommodate the vulnerable, mouse-sized inhabitants. 

It was only later, after meeting her husband and starting her own family, that the project gained momentum as a sustained construction project. The earliest interiors were drawn directly from the city around her. She began with Amsterdam’s market stalls, followed by an antique shop selling clocks and then the Rijksmuseum, whose Cuypers Library was translated into a double storey room with replica gilded furnishings crafted from bending brass and a collection of alphabetical ordered books. From there, the world expanded incrementally, without drawings or digital planning. Instead, “guided by intuition and available materials - an adult exploration of play”, she says.

Karina concocts her stories in a separate building, away from the gallery © Isabel Bronts.

As the mansion grew, two central characters emerged. Sam and Julia, a pair of mice whose movements loosely structure the project, pass through the rooms performing ordinary domestic routines. Julia, bold and inquisitive, lives alone with her mother and reflects Schaapman’s own childhood. Sam, quieter and more contained, comes from a large family and is inspired by her late husband. Together, they establish a narrative framework that remains open, allowing the interiors to carry the weight of the project.

In material terms, the project depends on a deliberately limited, physical process, with every element made by Schaapman’s hand. “Discarded paper becomes enamel jugs or birthday bunting. Smashed bicycle lights turn into bottles. Splinters of wood become polished floorboards,” she explains. “Nothing is perfect, but it works.”

Visitors hoping to find the artist at The Mouse Mansion itself are often disappointed. Schaapman’s working studio sits a short bicycle ride away, housed within a former school building originally designed for shared artisanal use.

Pictured, the young Karina Schaapman and her mother © The Mouse Mansion.

Inside, makeshift shelving supports an ordered profusion of materials, with drawers filled with archival textiles and thimble-sized hand-thrown clay teacups awaiting placement. Her tools remain intentionally basic. “I only use scissors, rulers and paintbrushes,” she says, an approach that underpins her insistence that the work remains accessible, and that “anyone can make something from almost anything.”

Although her children are now involved in the growing enterprise, Schaapman continues to work largely alone, extending the Mouse Mansion room by room. What began as a private act of making has since become an international children’s book series and television programme, though none of this was anticipated at the outset. 

The miniature interiors remain grounded in the same slow accumulation of objects and spaces, adjusted and repaired over time. Reduced in scale but not in intent, the artists model works offers a way to step momentarily outside the full-sized world, into a space shaped by shared imagination.