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Designer dollhouse auction: Hot market for mansions in miniature

Interior designer Adam Hunter peers through French doors into a lounged he decorated with Trove wallpaper, a custom Holly Hunt sofa and Hunter's design for a sculptural light. He also designed a bedroom that could pass for an actual shelter magazine spread.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
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Perhaps you recall the must-see-to-believe story of the Designer Dollhouse Showcase, for which top Los Angeles architects and interior decorators revealed the obsessive-compulsive gene that drives them to get every last detail just right, even if the project at hand is just 1:12 scale of reality?

Now comes word that at the charity auction where bidding on each designer dollhouse was expected to start at $15,000, “most” of the 10 houses did sell. Officials declined to specify which ones sold, or for how much, treating the auction results like some matter of national security. But a spokeswoman did say the event, the Kaleidoscope Ball at the Beverly Hills Hotel, as a whole raised nearly $1.8 million for the UCLA Children’s Discovery and Innovation Institute at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA.

For the deep-pocketed and dollhouse-obsessed out there, have no fear: You have a second chance. The unsold mini-manses go on sale May 19 on One Kings Lane.

If you haven’t clicked through Times photographer Mark Boster’s gallery, take the tour. Adam Hunter’s bedroom could be an Elle Decor spread, and even after seeing it 16 times, the photo of Richard Neutra’s landmark Kaufmann House framed above the headboard in Waldo Fernandez’s bedroom will still make you smile.

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craig.nakano@latimes.com

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