How To Play Dollhouse: 11 Ways To Encourage Imaginative Play


Now our dollhouse is nearly finished, the kids are desperate to play with it. But, I’ve noticed that when we’ve given them new toys in the past, their interest wanes after a few weeks. As it’s taken me so long to renovate this dollhouse, I want to make sure they play with it for years to come!

So I’ve looked into the best ways to encourage children to play dollhouse (as well as using my kids’ ideas).

1. Let your kids help decorate the dollhouse

My kids were involved in every stage of renovating our dollhouse. Although I didn’t go as far as letting them paint it, they had a say on what colours and wallpaper I used and which room would be used for what. Joni particularly liked designing wallpaper for the dollhouse in Canva – there’s a tutorial on how to do this below.

If you don’t want your kids to redecorate your existing dollhouse, then you can make one out of cardboard for them to decorate however they like. We made a foldable cardboard dollhouse and Joni loved picking the wallpaper and flooring out of a book of scrapbook paper – you can see the results and find out how to make other cardboard dollhouses here.

2. Choose dollhouse furniture with your kids

Once your house is decorated, why not let your children choose what furniture to put in it? Dollhouse furniture comes up regularly on places like eBay, Facebook Marketplace and even Freecycle.

Facebook Marketplace has some real bargains, like a shoe box full of dollhouse furniture, including a complete set from Lidl, for just £5!

But the best place I’ve found to buy second-hand dollhouse furniture is antique shops. We bought the all furniture below from a local antique shop for just over £30. And the best part was that searching through antique shops turned out to be a lovely way to spend a morning with Joni as she loved looking at all the items for sale, we even had tea and cake in the antique shop cafe!

You could take this one step further and let your children customise the furniture by repainting it. You can even buy unfinished dollhouse furniture to really let your kids get creative with their furniture up-cycling!

3. Let your kids move the dolls into the dollhouse

Empty the dollhouse of furniture, put it into a toy truck and let the dolls have a proper moving day. If you’ve recently moved or are about to move, this game would be an excellent way to let your kids chat about any anxieties they may have about moving house.

You can even bring a bit of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) into the game by taking about which items would be heaviest, how would the dolls get them upstairs, which items are fragile and how should they be protected and so on.

Another element to add to this game is to chat about where the house is, which country is it in, have they moved far, how is it different to the dolls’ old house, is the house in a town or the countryside. You could even look at a map or images of houses in different locations to bring a bit of geography into the game as well!

Moving day at the dollhouse.

4. Let kids choose the dollhouse furniture layout

Rearranging furniture is one of my kids most favourite ways to play with their dollhouse. But, what if you extended the game further?

You could let your child choose which room is going to be used for which purpose and how the furniture could be arranged in each room. For example, if there’s a tiny TV, how can they make sure everyone can see it? If there’s not enough dining chairs for all the dolls, what other items of furniture could they use?

You could also ask them to group the furniture and accessories together and ask them which room they go in and why. You may get interesting answers such as putting a bath the kitchen so the dolls can cook while they bathe! Or ask them to put all the things together that the dolls could sleep on, sit on, cook with etc. This will encourage them to think about the different purpose of each piece of furniture and how they should be categorised.

Ask your children which room they’d like to have if it was a real house and maybe let them create some tiny posters or pictures to decorate the room.

A great game to play is to assign each child to a room and let them design it as they wish, give them all the furniture and accessories and see what happens, you could even do a little competition and get them to judge each others’ efforts!

Evan picked the room next to the bathroom to be his bedroom.

5. Have a doll birthday party with decorations

This ideas combines crafting and imaginative play – ask your kids to come up with some ideas to decorate the dollhouse for a doll’s birthday party.

Start the story by letting the children tell you who’s birthday it is, how old they are and what kind of party they’re having to celebrate.

You can make miniature bunting using paper, glue and thread, or make confetti using these cute paper punches. Dollhouse specialists on Etsy sell beautiful accessories which would look wonderful for decorating a dollhouse ready for a party, including these handmade pom pom garlands by Mymoderndollshouse.

Image courtesy of Mymoderndollshouse on Etsy.

There are many ways to mix this theme up, including a dollhouse wedding, where you could make your own miniature flowers – check out this blog post for more ideas How To Make Miniature Model Flowers From Felt, Paper And Polymer Clay. Themes like weddings, bringing home a new baby, or even sending the dolls to school for the first time, all help children cope with transitional events by recreating their experiences through play.

6. Create a dollhouse Christmas

Dollhouses look beautiful when they’re all decorated for the holidays and it’s a great way to get kids creativity flowing too.

Ask your children what presents they think the dolls would want, they could even write a Christmas list to Santa on the dolls’ behalf! Can you kids make the presents out of recycled rubbish? Maybe a car out of a toilet roll and milk bottle tops for wheels? Or a beautiful new dress out of a fabric sample?

The children could wrap tiny boxes up with Christmas paper or scrapbook paper and place them under the tree, with one of the dolls playing Santa.

You can make a Christmas tree out of a fir cone painted green and placed on a cardboard ring for plant pot, or learn how to make model trees from scratch here, many of the techniques could be adapted to make Christmas trees.

On Etsy you can find many adorable Christmas accessories, including tiny Christmas stockings or these beautifully boxed Christmas decorations – not all of them are suitable for children though.

For a more traditional approach, could your kids turn the dollhouse into an inn and make a stable at the side out of cardboard or plastic packaging and act out the nativity?

7. Turn the dollhouse into a hotel

This is a great way to get your children thinking about holidays and being away from home.

Lead the play with questions such as, where is the hotel? What is the weather like? How long will they be away for? What will they do in the hotel or on holiday? If the hotel is somewhere very warm/cold, what have the dolls packed in their suitcases?

Rearrange the dollhouse so that there’s a reception desk and some bedrooms, and your kids might even want to add a restaurant for fancy dining!

They can act out scenarios with the dolls, such as a bellhop carrying their bags, or the bags going missing, or someone getting lost in the hotel. Or maybe the kids could sneak out after the grown ups are asleep and explore the hotel after dark?

8. Sort the dollhouse furniture and accessories

This is a great game to play with younger children who are just becoming familiar with colours and shapes. Ask your child to find all the items in the dollhouse that are a certain shape, such as round apples, stools with round tops, round cushions etc. and group these together. Alternatively, ask them to categorise objects be colour.

You can also ask them to categorise items by purpose, such as things to eat with, cook with, sit on, wash with etc.

A selection of Lundby dollhouse kitchen accessories

Sequencing also comes into this game as once children have categorised the items, they could then put them in different sequences. For example, sequencing items needed to make a meal – pan, utensils, cooker, serving dish or plate, cutlery – and talking to them about what order things are used in when cooking, serving or eating a meal.

9. Turn the dollhouse into a carpark or garage

Our little boy has loved cars ever since he was tiny and he regularly turn’s our Sylvanian Families’ house into a garage or carpark. While he doesn’t need any help to make this more engaging, we’ve added things like cardboard ramps, taped out parking spaces in the dollhouse and made a little petrol pump out of cardboard too.

10. Turn your dollhouse into a haunted house

How can your kids transform a cosy dollhouse into a haunted house? Projects such as making ghosts out of cardboard or cloth will get kids into the spirit (pun intended!) of Halloween or if they want some spooky fun any time of the year.

The tutorial below shows how to make miniature ghosts out of cheese cloth, it’s a bit messy and younger children will need lots of supervision but the results are so cute!

Once you’ve made the ghosts, they can play hide and seek with your kids! Ask your kids to look away and then hide the ghost somewhere in the dollhouse, how quickly can they find it?

You can incorporate a memory game into this theme as well by making the ghost move or remove pieces of furniture or accessories and asking your kids if they can see what’s gone or been moved.

11. Make a soft play centre in your dollhouse

Both our kids love softplay more than anything and they regularly incorporate it into their imaginative play. We’ve made softplay centres out of Lego, in real life with sofa cushions, and with a dollhouse.

Set up the dollhouse so there’s a reception desk to book the dolls in for their softplay session and use any small soft furnishing to transform the dollhouse into the ultimate softplay location. Flannels, soft toys and small cushions can all be used alongside cardboard tubes for slides and maybe even marbles for a ball pool.

Making a dollhouse softplay is a great way to get your kids thinking about what items in their real house they can repurpose and use in a mini softplay centre.

d