Museum of Miniature Houses & Other Collections

Incredible! I love miniature houses so I knew I would enjoy this museum, but it was way more than I expected. Thought it would be a cute little place we’d just buzz in and out of, but we stayed for over an hour. There’s room upon room filled with mini houses, all of them unique. And there’s a great audio tour that goes along with a lot of the houses so you can learn interesting facts along the way. Highly recommend!

This place is awesome. One of the only places worth visiting in Carmel’s otherwise sad, milquetoast excuse for an arts district.
This museum is exactly what it sounds like — a museum of basically, dollhouses. But it’s also more than that. The artistry that goes into some of these things is amazing — teeny tiny hand-​made furniture, painstakingly stitched tiny replicas of history textiles, wee little light fixtures. Much of the museum does focus on houses, but there is also a miniature museum (meta!) and a few other things that are so weird that you should probably just go see them and I won’t ruin it for you.
Really though, the joy of this place is getting to talk with one of the co-​founders — so many interesting stories and anecdotes relating to the making and acquisition of these collections. I only had about an hour to look around here and I barely saw the half of it – definitely allow yourself a decent chunk of time to enjoy this place.
This is probably not the destination for everyone, but well worth a visit if you like toys, beautiful craftsmanship, and/​or really interesting museum collections. Well worth the $ 5.

On the east edge of Carmel’s Arts and Design district, there is a little museum displaying impressively detailed miniature houses in the windows. If you like looking at tiny versions of things, this is the place for you! It costs $ 4 to tour several different rooms FULL of eensy-​weensy replicas of houses, furniture, people, animals… just about everything you can think of. One house has another miniature house within it. One scene is of a silvery, sparkly winter wonder land, and another is a doll shop filled with itty-​bitty dolls, detailed down to the last freckle and sock.
One thing I recommend doing is turning off the lights in each room of the museum — several of the houses are lit up beautifully and best viewed in the dark.
I was only able to spend an hour in there before it closed, but I loved it and plan on going back to stare at all the amazing details some more.