With so many festive events around the Puget Sound to choose from, sometimes the "Peace" of the holidays gets lost in the "Merry." At the Bloedel Reserve, located on the North end of Bainbridge Island, visitors can enjoy both by exploring the "Miniature Village and Model Railroad" exhibit displayed in the gracious ambience of the 80-year-old Bloedel Manor, set amid the tranquility and wonder of the 150-acre Bloedel Reserve.
Hand-built and assembled over the past 50 years by Bloedel docent and volunteer Dwight Shappell, the whimsical and detailed "Miniature Village" exhibit features: a Cookie Factory, Hansel and Gretel's Gingerbread House (now inhabited by Snow White and Seven Dwarfs), the life-like Maison Perou and French Village complete with restaurant and bakery, and the 6-foot-tall Castle. In all, there are eleven separate houses, each built and furnished using almost exclusively recycled materials, with dressers, beds, tables, paintings and sofas carved painstakingly in scrap cedar, juniper, koa, ash, cherry and walnut. The French bakery even has a tiny cash register and wooden loaves of bread on its shelves, which had me wishing I could go in and get a fresh loaf! A number of the fireplaces have individually cut wooden "bricks," while a peek in the Castle shows a game of miniature wooden chess men in mid-play.
For Shappell, a retired Air Force officer with a B.A. in Horticulture, it is the wood, and the ability to work with it, that draws him. "When I started building these houses," he says, "I really discovered the beauty of wood – the beautiful colors and different grains."
Shappell doesn't work from detailed drawings when he builds, but rather creates as he goes.
While Shappell had a fascination with woodworking as a child, thanks to both an uncle and grandfather who were handy craftsmen, it wasn't until the 1960s that he began his hobby creating miniature houses. Most of his creations were designed as display models. For instance, in 1963, he built a village display for a church bazaar out of discarded fruit crates. In the mid-1970s, for another church bazaar in Hawaii, he built the French Village as a fundraising attraction to help raise money for his son's mission trip to Tonga. After retiring from the military in 1980, Shappell worked as a retail florist on Bainbridge Island, where he built and displayed a number of whimsical creations for customers and friends. He retired in 1997.
Shappell's inspiration comes from many sources. His most recent, the Maison Pirou, is modeled after the former residence of the Duc de Bourbon, located in Thiers, France and built in 1410. After seeing it in 2006, he spent over 1,000 hours meticulously working from a photograph to make the outside as authentic as possible. The maison has 4,500 hand-cut cedar shingles salvaged from an old fence around Shappell's property and a cozy loft room with a cushioned reading bench that calls out for someone with a good book.
Visitors are free to wander and sit throughout the main floor of the former manor, now the visitor's center, which is currently decorated in holiday splendor reminiscent of an earlier time.
Kids of all ages will lose themselves in the miniature detail of each structure and delight in the model trains that steam around the Gingerbread House, Maison Pirou and the French Village.
Flashlights are provided to help viewers get a better glimpse into the tiny spaces, and helpful Bloedel staff members are available to answer questions. Cold guests can warm up with hot chocolate or cider.
So, make your holidays both festive and peaceful by escaping out to Bainbridge Island for an afternoon reprieve at Bloedel Reserve, and get caught up in a miniature village amid the elegance of a beautiful manor home.
