(playful music)
- When I was five years old,
my father made a dollhouse for me,
made everything, all the furniture, wooden furniture,
played with it every single day.
- [Jay] Pat Lohenry has loved miniatures
for as long as she can remember.
As a teenager,
she went from playing with them to making them.
And today they're all in her basement,
20 dollhouses and 170 room boxes.
Wow.
[Jay] It's a magical place, overflowing with her creations.
- This is January.
(playful music continues)
I can't seem to stop.
I want to do more and more and more
Fanatical? No. I just love the miniatures.
And you know, I can tell a story with miniatures.
- Look closely, and you can see those stories.
The boy crying because the ice cream fell off his cone.
The queen angry at her drunken maid,
or the girls pouting on the 4th of July
because the boys have cotton candy.
(laughs) I love these two girls.
- They're not happy.
- Pat says there's a divide among people who make miniatures
about whether or not to include people.
Chicago's most famous miniatures do not.
The beloved Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago
were designed and commissioned
by wealthy socialite Narcissa Thorne.
Pat loves and admires the Thorne Rooms,
she says, but she wants more life in her boxes.
So she puts in people.
- [Jay] What about the clothes?
- I make all of them.
- You make all of these clothes?
- Yeah, I make all the dolls.
I've made thousands of dolls.
- [Jay] What, you make the dolls themselves?
- [Pat] And the hair. (Jay laughs)
You can lose your religion putting hair on a doll.
Let me tell you it's true.
- [Jay] Pat buys the porcelain doll parts,
but then does the rest herself.
No, Pat does not make every item in every room.
She doesn't make the animals
or little food items, or utensils,
but she does make most of what you see in most scenes.
- The rug there is needle point, okay?
- What?
Wait, that's your own needle point?
- [Pat] Yes. - [Jay] Wow.
Now, how did Pat Lohenry go from playing with dollhouses
to building them? Simple.
When she was 13 that dollhouse her dad built
was getting too full.
- So I decided I'm going to put an addition
on his dollhouse.
Did I know how to build anything? No.
- [Jay] But she learned
and all the carpentry you see is hers.
- Men would go like,
"Oh my God, your husband, he built it?"
I go, no. He doesn't even know what a hammer is.
- [Jay] Pat Lohenry does not sell her miniatures.
In the eighties,
she had a small storefront museum for a few years,
and now she's in her eighties
and that's what she wants again.
- This is a sin to have it down here and not share it.
- [Jay] But Pat is retired and on a fixed income.
So she says the rent for a space
that would hold all this is out of the question.
So for now, she will just keep on making them
- And my family will say, "Stop making so much stuff."
"You got enough stuff. Stop making it."
You know, I can't stop.
- [Jay] And that original doll house furniture
that her dad made for her nearly 80 years ago?
Now it's in one of her boxes.
- Some people get dollhouses, you know,
and they play with it for awhile and then, you know,
they get tired of it.
I never got tired, never got tired of dollhouses.