VENTURA : Dollhouse Is Grand on a Small Scale

It’s a pristine 21-room Victorian-style home with hardwood floors and an indoor hot tub. Though it sits near downtown Ventura, it’s estimated value is only $100,000.

The catch is that the occupant would have to be just six inches tall to live in this miniature house, which is on display for the next 10 days at a hobby shop in Ventura.

The unusual 5 1/2-foot-by-4 1/2-foot dollhouse is equipped with all the amenities of a modern lavish lifestyle, including an indoor barbecue pit and a working big-screen TV.

But visitors to this project, 10 years in the making, have to watch it all from outside.

“When you’re looking in the rooms, you have to imagine yourself sitting at the bar,” said Larrianne Hilditch, owner of Larrianne’s Small Wonders on Main Street. “My favorite thing is the smoke coming out of the ashtrays.”

The highly detailed three-story house is the work of Bruce Plum, a hobbiest from Oregon, who exhibited the model at a show last week in Santa Barbara. When Hilditch learned that the house was to be stowed in a truck for several weeks, she volunteered to keep it in her shop--although it is not now on the market.

Hilditch, who has been collecting miniatures for 12 years, said the house is easily worth $100,000 considering that some collectors pay up to $10,000 for just one room. Thirty varieties of woods have been hand carved and inlaid to develop a rich interior. In one room, the signs of the zodiac have been neatly inlaid in the floor, and in another--the Safari Room--elephants appear to charge from a wall mural.

It’s all in a one-inch-to-the-foot scale.

“It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours for perfection like this,” Hilditch said.

Getting enthused about miniature houses involves a lot of imagination and fantasizing, and sometimes Hilditch gets in the mood by dreaming up little residents to live in houses she builds.

For instance, a San Francisco-style row house that Hilditch is now making will be occupied by a professional couple who have a little money to spend on renovating and antiques.

“He probably sells computers, and she’s a lawyer,” Hilditch said. “I like the fact that she has a better job.”