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Walking into this couple’s home is like stepping into a museum dedicated to the magic of all things miniature.
Tiny delights are everywhere: houses, furniture, clothes, books, gift boxes, towels, flowers, tea sets – practically everything you’d find in real life is on proud display here, bearing testament to a passion that’s been indulged for decades.
Amanda Pretorius of Sherwood Gardens, Brakpan, is a diorama fanatic and has been building miniature houses and their contents for 25 years. But diminutive dwellings aren’t the only collection in this house – Amanda’s husband, Willem, is a miniature car fan and has thousands of tiny vehicles on display.
Their home is a shrine to their collections, many rooms crowded with little objects. Amanda’s 1938 Tudor-style dollhouse from England, which she furnished and repainted, is front and centre of the living room and is her favourite item.
“I have miniature dollhouses for adults,” she says. “They’re too specialised for kids.”
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Amanda (62) builds many of her intricate displays herself. “I’ve loved tiny items since I was a young girl,” she tells us. “I used to make clothing for my dolls.”
She decided to start crafting little houses a quarter of a century ago after the family visited the Toy & Miniature Museum in Stellenbosch on their annual holiday. Amanda was transfixed by a wall of miniature flowers and told her husband, “This is what I want to do – I want to create miniature items like these.”
That Christmas, Willem bought Amanda her first ready-made miniature box room, which contained a chair, coffee table, picnic basket, a cabinet with plates inside, a clock and windows with curtains. She still has her first treasure, she says.
“In South Africa you don’t often find shops where you can buy miniature dollhouses and furniture. I found a guy in Johannesburg who had a shop inside his house where we bought some stuff. I bought a book from him and some wood and that’s how I started making my own houses and furniture,” Amanda says.
“Willem and I made a dining room – you can see the progress from when I started with a plain dining room to making more specialised items.”
Amanda sometimes buys DIY miniature sets she builds up but most of her collection is handmade. She uses magazines or the internet to search for inspiration for rooms or scenes to create, and crafts her interiors using 3mm plywood, glue and precision shaping tools.
Her collection ranges from a flower shop with tiny individual flowers, which took her six months to complete, to a library with 498 books. There’s also a Tudor-style farmhouse that cost her R2 500 and took three years to finish.
So how much has she spent on her collection? “I couldn’t give you a figure,” she says, laughing. “But it’s a high number.”
Willem (63) is an avid collector of Matchbox and Dinky Toy cars and has more than 2 500 on display with their original boxes which, he says, increases their value.
He’s been collecting cars for 40 years, starting with three Fiat Abarths, and adds to his collection each month at swop meets on the East Rand. He also shops online and many of his cars come from around the world.
The couple have two sons, Neville (38) and Neil (35), who loved growing up around tiny cars.
As a four-year-old, Neil was a fan of the movie Herbie and wanted a model of the famous 1963 Volkswagen Beetle featured in the film, so his parents imported one from France in its original box. It was one of their first imported models, Willem recalls.
Most of his collection is housed in an outbuilding he calls his man cave. One section has a cabinet filled entirely with miniature Fiat Abarth models.
Willem loves the Italian car brand – he was 18 when he owned his first real Fiat and now has eight actual Fiats parked in the yard, all in mint condition.
He took part in motor rallies and circuit racing for years and travelled around the country with Amanda beside him as his navigator.
“I stopped because it was getting too expensive,” Willem says. “I decided to buy and restore Fiats instead. I loved racing but I love my eight Fiats more.”
His miniature collection is close to his heart too and he shows us his Ferraris, two BP truck models, 120 tractor models and a Jaguar, which he built himself from instructions in a subscription magazine.
“Each wheel needed 78 spokes which I had to assemble,” he says. “For each car there’s a story.”
The couple have been married for 41 years. They met at college in 1978 when they were both studying telecommunications and went on to work at the Post Office as technicians.
Willem retired five years ago and Amanda is two years into retirement. Their sons also collect cars – although not on their father’s scale – and Neil has a special interest in Hot Wheels models.
Christmas Day in the Pretorius home is different to regular families, Amanda says. “We don’t buy each other normal gifts. “We work on 3D puzzles of things like ships and structures like the Eiffel Tower and the Milan Cathedral.”
“I always buy Amanda things to keep her hands busy,” Willem adds.
Eight years ago, Amanda made her husband a miniature Fiat Abarth car dealership complete with a service area with tiny equipment and tyres and a petrol station with pumps. Willem says he was offered R20 000 for his dinky dealership but he turned it down.
“It was a Christmas gift and you can’t sell that,” he says.
Once a year Amanda sells individual miniature pieces such as clothing, flowers, gift bags and books at a church fair in Pretoria but she isn’t interested in selling her dollhouses and furniture. Nor do she and Willem intend ever putting their collections on public display in a museum.
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“We get too much joy from them,” Amanda says.
Willem spends most of his time in his man cave and Amanda spends a good four to six hours a day planning her next creation in a well-organised room that contains her files of patterns and designs, as well as beads and charms for her creations.
The couple are now in the process of building a miniature English village and model train track with a farmyard and a mining district for Willem’s man cave.
It keeps them happy and it keeps them occupied, Amanda says. And the couple who create together, stay together. 
EXTRA SOURCE: BRAKPANHERALD.CO.ZA
