VR for Ambitious Toy Architects

   The New York Times
   December 18, 1994
   The Sunday Magazine, pp. 68-69.
   [Excerpts]


   The Acquiring Mind

   In a Little League of Their Own

   One doll house led to another and soon Carle Kaye was
   sitting on a small fortune.


   By Margo Kaufman


   In June, the Carole and Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures
   opened on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Los Angeles
   County Museum of Art and down the street from an equally
   over-the-top manifestation of one man's obsession, the
   Peterson Automotive Museum. Some 5,000 visitors a week pay
   from $3 to $7.50 to marvel at Carole Kaye's real-estate
   portfolio. It includes hundreds of Lilliputian properties
   -- from a weathered Arts and Crafts bungalow with Greene &
   Greene furniture, to an antebellum mansion surrounded by
   bougainvillea, to a Japanese palace with a koi pond, to a
   two-foot-tall Benedictine abbey, to an ebony and cloisonne
   Chinese temple, the museum's only antique doll house.

   But don't say doll house or Carole Kaye will instantly
   correct you: "They're miniature houses, dear."

   Doll house might have been good enough for an enthusiast
   like Queen Mary, but Kaye's mission is to have miniatures
   recognized as something larger -- an ambition that, if
   realized, would increase the value of her small holdings
   (the Kayes own 90 percent of the collection) and elevate
   the entire enterprise. "When you think of doll houses, you
   think of something cutesy that a child's going to play
   with," she says. "These things are meant for a collector.
   It's an art form."

   Certainly no child is going to while away a rainy day with
   an inch-to-the-foot replica of Fontainebleau, complete with
   a neo-classical gallery of Diana and 215 working lights.
   Kaye declines to say if her diminutive rococo extravaganza
   costs more than the original -- "We're not selling it" --
   but acknowledges that it's insured for half a million
   dollars.

   In fact, no one in the small but expensive world of
   miniatures operates on the unprecedented scale that Kaye
   does. Whereas less-fortunate aficionados fill their houses
   bit by bit, hunting down and savoring each new addition,
   Kaye simply commissioned an entire line of French furniture
   for her Fontainebleau. "The furniture is the finest in the
   miniature world," says Kaye, who travels to Europe several
   times a year to troll for tiny treasures and new artists.
   "The sconces are exact copies of the originals; the
   paintings are all hand done. My goal is to find the
   ultimate."

   Talking to her is a little reminiscent of envying the
   fourth grader who has every Barbie dress ever made. But
   it's impossible to resent her, because her taste is superb
   and the world she has assembled is so perfect in its
   surrealism.

   The impeccably dressed dolls sleep in carved four-poster
   beds under silk canopies. They eat their pygmy lobsters off
   Chippendale tables (the kind you see on the cover of
   Antiques magazine) set with monogrammed flatware, golden
   goblets and sterling-silver epergnes. The teensy Pekingese
   never stains the Aubusson, because, as Kaye is quick to
   point out, "That's the beauty of miniatures: you can make
   the world as perfect as you want it to be."

   Barry Kaye took to miniatures almost as quickly as his
   wife, which makes her one of the few collectors who doesn't
   have to hide her receipts from her mate.

   "Having been in the insurance business all my life, I'm
   used to rejection," says Kaye, who can frequently be seen
   on late-night infomercials explaining his miraculous estate
   planning system. "No one wants to talk to the insurance
   man.  On the other hand, at the museum, people can't come
   over to me fast enough to thank me. I say, 'I just support
   her and provide the money.' "

   From the looks of it, Kaye hasn't closed his checkbook in
   the last three years. "The collection has got to be worth
   more than $10,000,000 easy," says Pit Ginsburg, a member of
   the board of directors of the Miniature Industry of
   America. Sybil Harp, the editor of the doll house trade
   magazine, Nutshell News, agrees: "It's by far the largest
   collection of contemporary miniatures that's been assembled
   by a single individual."

   The Kaye's museum has 190 exhibits filled with hundreds of
   thousands of individually crafted bibelots. There are
   military figures, historical figures (including an
   18-inch-tall Louis XIV surrounded by equally peewee
   courtiers), model cars, planes, horses and ships (not to
   mention a replica of the Forbes yacht). Visitors can also
   marvel at a violin workshop encased in a life-size violin,
   a midget Hollywood Bowl with Louis Armstrong and his band
   and, surely the piece de resistance, a working 18-karat
   gold train, with 190 diamonds in the engine and a cargo of
   rubies, sapphires and emeralds made by Halberstadt Jewelers
   of Copenhagen.

   "She used to say, 'Don't give me anything unless I can wear
   it around my neck,' " Barry Kaye says. "But now she says,
   'Don't buy me anything unless I can put it in the museum.'"

   Most dazzling are the 15 remarkably detailed vignettes
   created by the legendary miniature craftsman Eugene J.
   Kupjack and his son, Hank, of Park Ridge, Ill. who has
   carried on his late father's work. These range from formal
   historic interiors like the "French New Orleans Parlor" to
   an enchanting "Red Diner" complete with minuscule jukebox,
   vinyl swivel stools, leather jacket hanging on the coat
   rack and even a pack of cigarettes on the counter. The
   diner, which is on loan to the museum, is for sale for
   $150,000, a price that might buy a real diner in many
   cities.

   Carole Kaye is definitely the mistress of her domain. "My
   wife has her own grand world there," her husband says. "She
   can decorate the houses, design the exhibits; all of her
   creativity is expressed." It is also an outlet for her
   emotions, something she realized when she built a house in
   memory of her sister, Gloria.

   "She was retarded and we were very close," she says. "I
   could never go and visit her that I didn't bring a box of
   sweets. So I made Gloria's Sweet Shoppe. And I made an
   apartment upstairs, the way I would have liked her to live.
   She lived in an institution for 45 years, but that's the
   beauty of miniatures: you can make it any way you like. I
   couldn't wait to get to the miniatures shop to buy
   something else to put in that Sweet Shoppe. And you know
   what happens, it becomes an obsession."

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