Many young girls and boys dream of owning a huge wood doll house. Creative skills can be built by allowing a child to organize, decorate, and furnish a small-scale home. Then family-modeled play involving the doll house people and their lives can truly help inspire a child through decision making and story telling.

Typically, a wood doll house is created after real homes in the world. House styles vary from area to area, but most wood doll house manufacturers use plans from the more popular home styles-Victorian, Colonial, Georgian, American farm house, or English Tudor.

A Victorian home is an elaborate two-story home that often came with an attic on the unfinished third floor. Named after Queen Anne who loved things to look regal, Queen Anne Victorian homes had a number of large windows, fancy curved wrap-around porches, irregular rooflines, and towers on the upper corner of the house. On the outside, these homes showcased exquisite millwork and latticework skirting. The open areas under the porches were also finished with the latticework skirting. Children love wood doll house models that are created to look like Victorian homes. The large rooms allow for entertaining and the upstairs contain many bedrooms to fit larger families.

Colonial homes are still extremely popular homes in the east. These two-story rectangle homes offer a lot of living space for the money. Their standard floor plans with the bedrooms upstairs and the living areas downstairs make them a wood doll house favorite.

Just like Colonial homes, Georgian houses also have a large living space, making them convenient for entertaining. They are also rectangular in shape. The difference lies in the fact that a Georgian home exterior is like a mirror image--one side is exactly the same as the other. This is because on either side there are borders consisting of huge brick or stone chimneys. Thus, they are grander than colonial houses.

An American farm house is probably the most simplistic wood doll house. This form of house is often T or L shaped and contains the main portion of the house and then an extension of living space branches off the back of the house forming an L or T shape. In a farm house, the bedrooms were usually upstairs while the bathroom, kitchen, dining, room, and living room remained downstairs. These are the most simple wood doll house to build.

Lastly, we come to English Tudor-style houses. They are really magnificent to look at, and remain a great favorite with children! True, this type of doll house is more expensive than the others, what with all the fancy settings! Again a two-storeyed construction, the living area and guest rooms remain on the main floor, while the bedrooms are upstairs. Why are these houses so special? Well, they have all these trappings to them--timber lines on the stone walls, parapets, cross-hatching near the roof line, huge stone chimneys and narrow windows.

Let your child help decide which wood doll house is right for them. Including them in every decision will allow them to feel as though their opinion matters and it also ensures that they'll enjoy it for years to come.