What a child’s toy can tell us about how we want to live

The ubiquity of Barbie means that Barbie’s house is perhaps the most familiar interior in the world, and most desirable — or at least that’s what little girls have long been encouraged to believe. So the Design Museum’s upcoming exhibition on Barbie (which seems to have come a little late, a year after the movie opened) might be mainly about the doll but it is also, inevitably, very much about the house.

The Barbie Dreamhouse of 1962, for instance, is an intriguing thing. First, it is not a house at all, rather a cardboard room set. More like a motel bedroom in fact — though it was supposed to be a ranch-type house. Second, it is, unlike more recent incarnations, kind of cool.

This mid-century interior, with its built-in furniture, TV and stereogram cabinet, yellow bed and bookshelves with little cardboard books (I tried to read the titles on the spines but it looks like they’re just a series of generic dashes) is, Design Museum curator Danielle Thom tells me, “very much the home of a modern single woman”. There is, she points out, no kitchen.

All of Barbie’s houses were dubbed the “Dreamhouse”. Even though they were real. If reduced. The Dreamhouse in the movie, from the imagination of production designer Sarah Greenwood, was not based on a single Barbie Dreamhouse but rather is a hybrid, a vibe. And the vibe is pink. Extremely pink. A rumour flared around the filming that London’s paint shops had run out of pink (it was filmed at Warner Bros’ Watford Studios). Paint is mixed on site and pink is mostly white with a dash of red. As almost all paint is white, the likelihood of white running out is approximately zero. So that, too, was all part of the incredible swirl of hype around the movie, itself a massive PR campaign for Mattel.

The Dreamhouses became as much a part of the attraction as the dolls themselves and their development tracks changes in domestic design and desire, perhaps even more closely than the famously small-waisted and perkily boobed doll. From the modest fold-out 1962 cardboard version, subsequent houses adopted plastic with great relish.

The original Barbie’s designer, who appears as a kind of unlikely God-figure in the movie, was Ruth Handler. Her husband, Elliot Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her, was a pioneer in plastics, making furniture from Lucite and Plexiglas. It figures, why wouldn’t the house be made of the same ubiquitous material of modernity as Barbie herself?

The first house was more a college dorm, perfect for an educated, aspirational single girl. Things escalated quickly. In 1974 the dream was a boho town house featuring frilly Victoriana and modernist furniture, a kind of junk-shop Blow-Up-chic combo in vivid Technicolor. Five years later, Barbie gets a pitched roof (Thom thinks, credibly, that it might have been inspired by an early Frank Gehry house as the Handlers once commissioned an — unrealised — house from the architect). It is determinedly modern. Then something happens. A kitchen appeared, suddenly, for instance, in the Reagan era of family values. Barbie became domesticated.

By 1990 the Dreamhouse has gone the full McMansion; a bubblegum-kitsch fantasia of colonial columns, arched windows, Juliet balconies and pink rococo furniture. The last traces of modernism have disappeared; this is the era of big houses; of Dallas and Dynasty. A decade on it has morphed into a kind of San Francisco Victoriana rendered in lavender and with a fairytale corner tower, violet vernacular. Back into the city from the suburbs, a reflection of the rise of tech or a comment on the burgeoning success of Post Modernism?

In 2006 a freestanding roll-top bath appears. Astonishingly, it is white. Then the Modernism returns. The renaissance of mid-century, the rediscovery of Palm Springs holiday homes brought with it the 2021 Dreamhouse, the pink more vivid but tempered by a few flashes of blue and violet. The pitched roofs, the suburban excess and the ’Frisco Victoriana have given way to a blocky angularity.

There’s a DJ booth on the roof terrace, a lift for disabled access, the furniture is crisp and modern and there’s a pink wavy slide, a bit like Miuccia Prada has in Milan. But this is also an interior for the social media age. Gone are the vestiges of facades and privacy — this is a see-through, X-ray house, a lifestyle backdrop in which the interior life is fully and permanently exposed. This is a house for an influencer rather than a college girl of a career woman. It can be supplemented, Taylor Swift-style, with a private pink Dreamplane.

The houses have barrelled through everything from the original ranch style to Rococo Futurism and mid-century revival. The later versions resemble a kind of feminised Zillow fantasy, real estate gone mad. Yet compared with actual suburban homes and McMansions, these houses have remained relatively restrained. One bedroom? Pah. Frankly un-American.

The house in the Barbie movie wasn’t any of these but rather a hybrid, a more Modernist version with extended, cantilevered terraces, a swirlier pink slide and a lot more outside space with yellow loungers, parasols and palm trees. And it’s in a close of similar, if not identical, houses with old-school streetlamps and pink picket fences. In another brand extension of a brand extension (Barbie is always building extensions), you could stay at a version of the Dreamhouse in Malibu via Airbnb (your host, “Ken”), though this seemed a mongrelised Mojo Dojo Casa House and Dreamhouse. But he has not succeeded in masculinising it.

Implicit in the notion of the Dreamhouse is the decadence of too much space, the suburban dream of endless sprawl

Barbie has survived because it has managed to keep a little ahead of desire and just enough behind fashion to still be relatable. Implicit in the notion of the Dreamhouse is the decadence of too much space, the suburban dream of endless sprawl in which a house is a self-contained world disregarding its context.

You might argue, of course, that this is true of all doll’s houses. But the intent here is something different. The miniaturised grand stately homes played with by the British upper classes in the 18th and 19th centuries were, at least in part, educational tools that allowed a girl to understand the complex workings and class relationships in a big modern house; the nature of the work done downstairs, the responsibility in running a house that was a status symbol and an entire economy.

Barbie’s Dreamhouses have left all that behind; these are pleasure palaces framing a lifestyle of leisure. The books on the shelves have disappeared. But there is that rooftop terrace with a stick-on backdrop of a Malibu sunset. The perfect setting, perhaps, for a selfie.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

‘Barbie: The Exhibition’ opens on July 5, designmuseum.org

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