NYC-inspired cardboard dollhouses
These highly detailed, NYC-inspired cardboard dollhouses from Swedish company Our Children's Gorilla are really delightful. The insides are totally blank, "to be decorated to your heart's content" -- a great balance of blank canvas for imagination and artwork for inspiration. Link (via Babygadget)
the latest
latest episodes
Adorable, until you look at the price. A sixty-two dollar cardboard box, unless I am reading it wrong, makes this a product for the rich and bored.
The dollar is going down hard, ain't it? Ouch.
Happily, given any cardboard box and some crayons or markers, most kids find they can muster the imagination without 62 dollars worth of screen printing for inspiration.
"Highly detailed"?
It looks to me like they printed off a photograph for the front, and a generic brick background for the sides, they didn't even use multi-color printing. Then they hacked out squares in the same general area & size as some of the windows. And since when do NYC firehouses have giant flap doors hacked out of a large swath of the front?
They are cute, but they are far from "highly detailed", and they are *very* far from worth $62 (though since that includes shipping it does make it closer to reasonable).
I agree with #1, give a kid an old box and some crayons any they'd have about as much fun for a lot less money (and without the pollution of shipping these from Sweden.
Or alternately the company could provide a printable PDF with templates, the front & side images and instructions for a reasonable price. Then the parents could print it out, cut & assemble it and build the same thing out of whatever leftover cardboard they had, which would be much cheaper, more ecologically sound, and take probably less than 20% more time then assembling these from the flat-pack kits.
Wait, I just looked at the site again, they want $62 EACH? That is just insane. I could but a real wood dollhouse kit for that sort of money.
Hey that's engine 55 in little Italy , Steve Buscemi's old Firehouse.
Sweet! I'm gonna hang curtains to divvy up floors into rooms and put 20-odd dolls on each floor to recreate a real 19th-century NYC tenement!
I will some day make these for my future children for a fraction of the cost. (Even when the future dollar is nearly worthless.)
No matter what they cost, if you gave one of these to a 6 year old, she would look at you with incredulity. "What's THIS? A shoe box?"
Ditto on that "yikes" about the price. I can recommend imagination, markers, and Fresh Direct boxes. You get about 15 free with any order in NYC!
I have a very strong desire to tag the shit out of the wall at the side of M&R cleaners.
It just shows you: there's no end to the creating and selling of SHtuff, without shame. "Let's just see what people would buy." I suppose we are to think that the price means that we *should* want it, and if we don't we must be low class folk. It's not even colorful; it's drab. My son is just 1 y/o, but when the time comes, I'm going to show him how to take a pair of scissors to a box like a surgeon and create from the Imagination.
When I was around 12 I used to make small fortresses for my WWII plastic soldiers using discarded cardboard, or taken from leftover briefcases my mother brought from symposiums her boss organized because it is a lot sturdier, not to mention stone grey. I remember fondly of one that had two floors and a working door that could be bolted inside, all this without using glue.
The price seems way off, and children should be given cardboard as a way to boost creativity, not to stifle it.
Perfect for my Untouchables diorama, now I only have to find a Costner figure pushing Drago off the roof.
@MarlboroTestMonkey7
I'd be happy to make Ness and Drago figures out of cardboard and sell them to you for the low, low price of $62 each.