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Westwood House: A Craft Story 

in Miniature 

Liza Antrim’s deeply personal dolls’ house, Westwood House, is one twelfth the size of the grand showpieces that inspired it, yet deserves comparison on craft alone. Built by David West, this large (by miniature standards) and exquisitely detailed house features elegant 18th-century interiors: tapestries, parquet floors, muraled walls and painted ceilings. Its rooms suggest intimacy, narrative, and loving curation, as Ros Byam Shaw explores.

It takes a special house to fill a book, particularly when that house is a twelfth the size of the real thing. Queen Mary’s dolls’ house at Windsor Castle is one such and has been the subject of at least a dozen handsome volumes. Westwood House has just become another. "Please don’t compare mine with Queen Mary’s," says its owner Liza Antrim, who has written its beautifully illustrated story. "Westwood House is not a showpiece, it’s much more personal."

Despite this stern warning, the comparison is inevitable. Like Queen Mary’s dolls’ house, Westwood is unusually large and built in the round. Its four elegant facades in early 18th century style each swing open to reveal rooms of comfortable grandeur; a central hall lit from a cupola on the roof, a long gallery hung with tapestries, a panelled dining room, a Chinese bedroom. There are painted ceilings, parquet floors, antique furnishings, oil paintings, dogs, a huge larder, a boot room. "It’s my dream house."

The grand entrance hall, published in 'Westwood House, An Architectural Masterpiece in Miniature' by Liza Antrim (Cider House Books, 2025).

Liza wrote the book as a tribute to David West, the artist she commissioned to make it, and to all the other skilled makers who contributed to its contents. The seven-year commission, which began in 1978 and finished in 1985, became a friendship that has lasted nearly 50 years. She had admired David’s architectural boxes, which see'd seen on sale in David Mellor’s shop on London's Sloane Square, and subsequently met him, commissioning a couple of small pieces.

Eventually, she "plucked up the courage" to ask him if he would consider making her a dolls’ house. "I had collected miniatures since childhood, but never had a dolls’ house that felt worthy of them," Liza says. "To my amazement, David agreed but said it would take a long time. He wanted to base its design on a Queen Anne house in Mitcham he first saw as a little boy, and I agreed. After that, I rather left him to his own devices."

A muralled bedroom published in&n'Westwood House, An Architectural Masterpiece in Miniature' by Liza Antrim (Cider House Books, 2025).

David describes how he sketched out the design of the house and its basic construction and then invented as he went along. "I had limited carpentry skills and tools but a great supply of hardwood offcuts from various workshops around Camberwell where we lived. The only wood I bought new was the mahogany for the stand and the plywood for the carcass. I wanted to create views through rooms and the play of light you get in a real house. Opening the doors and taking off sections of the roof made me think of pop-up books and stage sets."

All the architectural detailing of Westwood's interiors, from ceiling mouldings to the carved chimneypieces, is made of wood. "I went into a sort of trance when carving the banisters for the stairs," says David, "there were so many of them". He also tells how he once managed to get his head jammed between walls inside the house trying to fix some minute door hinges. "Eventually I wriggled out."

During the making, David and his wife moved from London to Lyme Regis. "He sent regular photographs of progress," says Liza, "but I was still taken by surprise by the scale of it - and the beauty - when it arrived. We had a terraced house in Lambeth and the only room it fitted in was the drawing room, but it left no space for anything else. Which is when we decided we had to move and bought my mother’s old house in Hampshire."

Liza and her late husband, Alexander Antrim, met when working as fine art restorers for The Tate Gallery in London. Westwood House not only prompted a relocation but also a change of career for Liza, who turned her expertise to restoring antique dolls' houses, of which she now has a peerless collection, and about which she has also written. 

The nursery, published in 'Westwood House, An Architectural Masterpiece in Miniature' by Liza Antrim (Cider House Books, 2025).

Her talent for art and her patience for painstaking craftsmanship are on show in some of the exquisite furnishings of Westwood. These include: miniature oil paintings ("copies of paintings I yearned to own" of Glenarm Castle, the Antrim family home); portraits of her husband and daughter, Rachel; carpets with stitches the size of pinheads; pots of flowers inspired by the work of Beatrice Hindley, cut from sheets of brass shim and painted; plates and plates of delicious food weighing down the shelves of the larder; the tables in the servants’ hall and kitchen; the dining room sideboard and the dumb waiter. Much of these extraordinary pieces have been moulded and painted by Liza and Rachel.

The larder, published in 'Westwood House, An Architectural Masterpiece in Miniature' by Liza Antrim (Cider House Books, 2025).

She is right to insist that this dolls’ house is personal. Shelves in the linen cupboard are piled with her mother’s folded lawn handkerchiefs, the design of the landing wallpaper is inspired by her collection of sponge ware. In the bathroom there is a box of tissues smaller than a postage stamp, made by Liza as a child. And in the long gallery is an exquisite secretaire, a copy of Liza’s favourite piece of full-size furniture.

The house contains treasures too numerous to list – you could pore over the photographs in the book for hours and still miss some extraordinary miniature masterpiece – a coin-size dartboard, a pair of glass candlesticks as light as thistledown, a tiny clay pipe. In the study there is a record of God Save The King which Liza thinks was produced to celebrate Queen Mary’s dolls’ house. ‘It’s reputed to play’ she says, ‘if you just happen to have a tiny record player.’

Words by Ros Byam Shaw

Images by Antony Crolla courtesy of Liza Antrim, author of 'Westwood House, An Architectural Masterpiece in Miniature' (Cider House Books, 2025).