A Little About Liza Antrim

I have always found something entrancing about tiny things. I vividly recall the delight of first looking into Vivien Greene’s “English Doll’s Houses”and finding treasures such as a shelf of bisque foods, so inviting and delicious, but also rather strange: a cauliflower cheese and a pig’s head! I was hooked. I was encouraged by items that would appear at Christmas and birthdays; a suite of exquisitely fine fretwork furniture from the Medici Gallery; a little Viennese bronze kitten; some pieces of Westacre black and gilt furniture from Morrell’s in the Burlington Arcade, and a magical Beatrice Hindley carnation. I decorated and redecorated my Triang stockbroker Tudor dolls’ house and loved it dearly. But it wasn’t really that nice, and I hankered after something better. The house eventually got dumped in the attic, but the contents were packed carefully away until such time as they could be housed somewhere that would do them justice. It was a long time coming, but eventually I commissioned a fantastic house, and six years later my treasures could at last be displayed in an appropriate setting. Many other things had been collected in the meantime, so I started to buy the odd older house to accomodate them, and from that small start I was on the collector's slippery slope. And I suppose I still am.