Letters about children's playhouses have come to the Playhouse Memory Archive from all over Sweden and describe miniature houses in all social environments. The oldest playhouses in the archive are from eighteenth-eighties, but of course older ones are also found. It has mostly been elderly women who have answered my appeal and sent me around 250 letters and almost as many pictures to describe their childhood delight. More than half of the letters tell stories about playhouses build by a father or another close male family member, but of course some playhouses are bought from factories or warehouses or created by a nearby carpenter while others are reused chicken-, ducks-, or other small houses. Wooden planks from old boxes are used for building playhouses as well as planks sawn from timber cut in the families own forest.
Also the interior decorations varies between playhouses. Most often it is a mother, an aunt or a grandmother who are in charge and fill the houses with newly bought childsized items like furniture and chinawares or give the children leftovers from the grown-ups own households. In the old days some playhouses were equipped with handwowen carpets and curtains or embroidered towels and for some families the mail order catalogues were a good help. Sometimes the childsized furniture were handmade by a carpenter or a handy father or a grandfather.
The playhouses became most popular in the early twentieth century when people in Sweden had learn to appreciate sunshine, fresh air and outdoor vacation life. Many families left the innercities and built houses of their own in the outskirts or bought summer villas or cottages at the countrysides. Gardens with fruittrees, vegetables and flower beds were beautiful surroundings for the playhouses where families gather for birthday parties or other more casual outdoor events.
In Sweden most playhouses are red with white corners and white boarded window-sills. Yellow painted houses with white decorations are thereafter the most popular colors but of course a playhouse can be painted in almost any imaginable color. Playhouses are most often given as a surprise present by parents to their daughter on her fifth or sixth birthday. Many letterwriters describe the overwhelming feelings and happiness over being a real houseowner with responsibility and a housekey of their own at such an early age. A playhouse is not only a place for childhood joy and imitations of the grown-ups life and work, but also a retreat for the teenage girls. There they can be by themselves and read, and think about life in general or chat with their friends. Later on the houses often are used as an extra guesthouse or a general shed in the garden. A lot of families keep the playhouses intact for the younger generations to come and many feelings are put together when a small girl in the third or fourth generations plays with the same playthings as her great grandmother once did in her childhood.
The early playhouses were built by the upper classes in the gardens and parks of their mansions. Above you can see one example from the outskirts of Stockholm. Also the farmers in the north of Sweden built small childsized houses for the kids to play in. The tradition of building many small houses for different uses were common in northern Sweden and an extra house for the children's joy were quite self-evident especially as these playhouses often were built by the young boys on the homesteads.
The playhouse on the picture to the right is from Remmen in Harjedalen. Today you can see this playhouse at the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm. The playhouse from the village of Remmen is built in the same way as the old logged charlets used by the farmers while tending their domestic animals during the summer stay up in the woods. The playhouse therefore has a big flat stone as a fireplace on the earth floor and a small opening for the smoke to rise through the wooden roof. Four quite young brothers built this timber playhouse in late 1880 or in early 1890.
In a time when the youngsters early in life had to learn how to use a fire many well equipped playhouses in Sweden had a childsized iron stove for cooking and a small chimney on the roof for the smoke to get out. Miniature cut firewoods were used to heat the stove and sometimes the children could serve their near and dear a playhouse cooked meal with many dishes. At the time pots and pans of iron and copper were manufactured and children's cookbooks were published and used as a help in the playhouse kitchens. Stories in children's literatures and weekly magazines guided the youngsters in how to be a good and well trained playhouse hostess. Nowadays the stoves are replaced by wooden imitations and of course the fire is too dangerous to play with. When gas and electricity were installed in the homes there was no longer a need to teach the young ones how to master a fire.
In our time playhouses are found everywhere in Sweden. The houses are so taken for granted that they almost are invisible unless you really look out for them. Do so and you will see them everywhere, in the neighborhood, in the countryside, from the car- or train window and even in a narrow backyard in downtown Stockholm. But of course the tradition to decorate gardens with small summer cottages goes back to the middle of the sixteenth century. At that time the king of Sweden had the first known Swedish summer cottage built as a retreat and getaway place from the often cold and drafty royal palace. In the centuries to come these so called "lusthus" became more and more popular among the nobility and in the late nineteenth century, when children in Sweden got a more prominent place in the bourgeois society, the "lusthus" were often used as a meetingplace and a good shelter from summer rain and cold winds. The "lusthus" of course soon were taken over by the children and their playthings and the grown-ups retreated to the more quite verandahs. The first playhouses for children were a fact.
|