Tiny Treasures That Make a Big Impact

Whoever said “you can’t please everyone” has never visited the Carole and Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures.

Dollhouses are the least of what this museum has to offer. This 14,000-square-foot homage to the belief that good things come in small packages transcends both age and gender, making it a perfect family outing for everyone, Mom and Dad included.

“It was fun, but it was serious too,” announced 10-year-old Nora Bright on a recent Sunday afternoon. Nora hit it on the nose. In addition to whimsical figures like Nora’s favorites--6-inch to 22-inch monkeys and birds adorned with white powdered wigs and hand-beaded 18th century dresses edged with antique lace--this enormously entertaining museum (directly across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) offers plenty of educational opportunities.

Displays include 33 exquisitely handcrafted George Stuart historical figures, among them Louis XIV and Catherine the Great. A dozen of them are owned by the museum, and another dozen or so are on rotating loan from the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

Other pint-sized exhibits mirror full-sized counterparts in prestigious temporary or permanent museum collections.

“When I knew that Los Angeles County Museum of Art was going to mount a Van Gogh exhibit earlier in the year, we commissioned miniatures [business card-sized or smaller] of all the Van Gogh paintings they were displaying--plus a few more,” says museum co-founder and curator Carole Kaye. The museum’s Van Gogh exhibit ran concurrently with LACMA’s.

Lilliputian-sized models of the Washington, D.C.-based Smithsonian Institution’s collection of inaugural gowns worn by the nation’s first ladies appear on the second floor of this small, small world. Like most of the museum’s displays, the dresses are re-created using a scale of one inch per foot.

“We also have just about every car in the Petersen [Automotive Museum] collection,” Kaye points out, referring to another Wilshire Boulevard institution. Most of the Lamborghini, Ferrari, Hispano-Suiza Kellner and 400 other die-cast Franklin Mint and Danbury Mint model cars on display, however, are no bigger than your hand.

These cars were the highlight of 16-year-old Loany Cibrian’s visit, while 6-year-old Luis Lemer thought film director John Frankenheimer’s personal collection of miniature World War II planes, trucks and tanks set in 17 war scenes was the coolest thing there.

Though it is of tremendous appeal to children, visitors can see that the museum is anything but child’s play. Insured for $25 million, it is believed to be the largest publicly displayed collection of contemporary miniature art in the world.

Taking Special Pleasure in Presenting Palaces

Carole Kaye attributes her interest in miniatures to building a dollhouse for her grandson in 1990. As her own designs and collection grew, her husband, Barry, an insurance underwriter who has written such books as “Save a Fortune on Your Estate Taxes” and “Live Rich,” saw the opportunity for displaying them. They opened their museum in 1992 and moved it to the present site in 1994.

Perhaps most striking in the collection are models of palaces such as France’s Fontainebleau (this particular chateau is insured for more than $500,000), England’s Hampton Court Palace (built with 75,000 bricks, each smaller than a paper clip), the Doges’ Palace from St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy (duplicated right down to the mismatched shades of marble on the building’s exterior) and a 10 1/2-foot-tall re-creation of the Vatican (Sistine Chapel included, of course).

One side of each building shows the exterior. The other reveals a cutaway of the rooms inside. And what rooms they are. The museum’s copy of Fontainebleau took 18 months to complete and includes 215 working lights that flicker on meticulously copied chandeliers poised above models of the actual furniture at the former summer palace of French kings.

Hampton Court Palace includes a parquet floor made from more than 2,000 pieces of wood and moldings covered with 24-karat gold leaf. “If you take a picture and don’t tell people how small it is, they think they’re seeing the real thing,” Kaye says proudly.

When the actual furnishings of a palace or monument featured in the collection no longer exist, extensive research is done to make sure that the furniture portrayed in the miniature is historically accurate. Signs give gawkers a balanced combination of historic data and fun facts regarding the model version’s construction.

This year’s additions include the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors and king’s study room, furnished, in part, with an eyeglass-case-sized Louis XV cylinder desk made of 2,300 inlaid pieces, 37 kinds of wood and 2,700 18-karat gilded carvings.

“This is magnificent work,” sputtered Harry Steinman, a resident of Miami Beach who recently visited the museum with his wife and their sister-in-law, Barbara Honig of Los Angeles. “I’m in the furniture business. Inlaids on a full-sized piece of furniture [take] hours and hours to do and [are] incredibly difficult and expensive. Something like this--it’s unbelievable!”

“Every time I come here, I see something different,” Honig says. “This is about my 10th trip here. I bring a lot of out-of-town visitors, because this is something they just won’t see anywhere else.”

The museum’s 226 exhibits also include a smaller-than-a-matchbook solid-gold train engine pulling a cargo of real diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires; a model of the Titanic constructed from 75,000 toothpicks; and a diorama of the Hollywood Bowl with Count Basie, Nat “King” Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.

One of the most astounding displays features six jeweler’s loupe-magnified micro-miniatures no bigger than the tip of an eraser. They include the Statue of Liberty carved from amber and a bouquet of roses made from fish scales mounted on stems made from hair.

Those wanting to take a piece of miniature magic home can visit the museum’s gift shop, where Montrachet-filled wine bottles the size of pen caps and hand-blown, thumbnail-sized copies of Waterford crystal are displayed along with dollhouse starter kits.

Items begin at 50 cents for a miniature pig and go as high as $150,000 for a room box (a kind of diorama you can display on a shelf).

Celebrity customers include Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Carrey and Candice Bergen, but that’s not what motivates Kaye to share her collection with the public. “We’ve created a perfect world,” she explains with a sweep of the hand. And who doesn’t deserve to experience a little of that?

BE THERE

The Carole and Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures, 5900 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays. Adults, $7.50; seniors 60 and older, $6.50; students 12 to 21, $5. Children 3 to 11, $3. Information: (323) 937-7766 or https://www.museumof miniatures.com.