Category:Not Quite Dollhouses

The subject of dollhouses has a number a "peripheral areas" that can make classification difficult.

For this category, we are excluding "obvious" dolls' houses (houses for dolls) and dollhouses (toy or model houses meant to be decorated, arranged and played with without human dolls), and focusing on other types of building with similar play dynamics:

• Toy forts – these were usually intended to be played with in conjunction with toy soldiers. Open forts (as opposed to "closed" castles) typically had large open spaces, and lots of ramps and doorways where soldiers and their horses and equipment could be arranged.
• Toy shops – allowed the owner to either play at shopping, or play at being the shopowner. They usually represented grocers, with large numbers of packets and packages that could be arranged and rearranged on the shelves, in a similar way to how dollhouse owners might arrange furniture.
• Noah's Arks – popular in the late Nineteenth Century, toy arks were simple to make out of wood, and were "lived in" by Mr and Mrs Noah, and lots of carved wooden animals, although the ark itself was usually a single room used for storage, with the inhabitants usually played with "outside" (e.g. arranged on a ramp waiting to board).

Another genre was single toy rooms (usually as toy kitchens, but sometimes other rooms such as toy bathrooms) – as single rooms form a domestic house, we're considering these to be a subset of the "dollhouse" category.

Other more obscure categories:

• Toy schools
• Toy hospitals

We're not including toy zoos, farms and circuses, because the animal and people figures were arguably more important than the buildings.

We're not including construction sets and building block sets, where constructing the building itself is the major method of play, rather than using the interiors as play areas.

We're also not including buildings mainly used as backdrops and scenery – although railway stations have play value in that they can be "dressed" with passengers and luggage, they are usually meant to be secondary accessories for a model railway.