Wood's friend works at Herman Miller. She gave us this stool for a wedding present. For our anniversary, she gave us a bunch of miniatures of Herman Miller classics, including several miniature walnut stools. Wood and I have been kind of puzzled about what we are supposed to do with them.

Then it struck me: doll house.

I am going to give this little girl the world's coolest dollhouse. Someday, in a few years, Earring-Magic Ken will be giving Hipster-Bangs Barbie a totally fabulous makeover while she sits on one of those Eames walnut stools in her pomo dollhouse that could have been designed by Robert Venturi. Hipster-Bangs Barbie will throw great vintage 2001-era parties where Lesbian-Mustache Midge (a conceptual artist) will toss back the tiniest little mojitos with Afro-Centric Christie (a recent runner-up on America's Next Top Model). My girl's dolls are going to throw the best parties, even if those brutish He-Men crash them right when the Chocolate Fondant is being served.

So I went online and investigated whether the daddytypes mentality has invaded the world of dollhouse designers and manufacturers.

For the most part, it hasn't. Unfortunately, 99.9% of dollhouses are Victorian Queen Anne monstrosities where any doll inside instantly becomes an old spinster named Miss Narcissa Murple who spends her days dusting doilies and sitting in her parlour playing the Northumbrian Quadrilles on her autoharp. And that just ain't going to cut it for Hipster-Bangs Barbie and her multicultural-artist friends. Juniper is going to be a modern woman, and I need to give her a modern dollhouse, damn it.

There are two modern dollhouses that I was able to find: the Villa Sibi (designed by Christoph Bitzer and Wolfgang Sirch) and the Kaleidoscope House made by Bozart toys. Neither of them seems to be in production any more, and as you can see, they kind of suck. The one on the left looks like Cameron's parents' house in Ferris Bueller's Day Off that Ferris describes as "like a museum---it's very cold, and very beautiful, and you're not allowed to touch anything." I mean, can't you just see my Dutch-ass paying $600+ for that thing and then letting Juniper look at it, but not touch it? That isn't going to work. The Kaleidoscope House is better in that respect, but it looks like the producers of MTV's Real World gave a Trading Spaces reject designer $25 bucks to spend at Ikea to decorate the entire house (in other words, it looks like the last five Real World houses). Juniper needs something more substantial. Something made of molded plywood, damn it, or at least something more exciting than plastic.

So I did what I usually do about 5-10 times a day. I went to eBay. Turns out there are some pretty cool vintage modernist dollhouses out there. Vintage always trumps new in my book, anyways. But they're expensive. This guy will even design you a realistic San Francisco Victorian dollhouse. I wonder: if I sent him a picture of our Edwardian, could he make an exact replica of the house Juniper spent her first year in? That would be cool. But $6500+? Yeah right, dude. I'm sure some people still consider real estate a good investment, but $6500 for a doll's house is a sure sign that the Bay Area housing bubble really is out of control. Hipster-Bangs Barbie's cousin Midwest Becky could live in a fucking palace for that.

So I'll probably resort to my basest instinct: thriftiness. I will teach myself some simple AutoCAD, take a trip to Home Depot, zip up my Old Navy Carpenter's Jeans and Do It Myself. Either that or scour the dumpsters behind a bunch of architecture firms for rejected presentation models that could double as dollhouses. If it turns out that I can only find a model warehouse or a model factory, I don't mind. I'll strip out the insides and turn it into a killer loft.

Lesbian-Mustache Midge and SoHo Stacey would probably prefer that anyways.