Barbie Historian Breaks Down The Dreamhouse Evolution (1962-Now)

I'm Whitney Mallet, and I co-wrote the architecture book

on the Barbie Dreamhouse.

I'm gonna show you the architecture and design details

of four Barbie dreamhouses from 1962 to 2021.

[upbeat music]

This is the first ever Barbie dreamhouse.

It looks like a box, but it's actually the house.

Right away, you see this flat roof line, it's single story.

You've got big picture windows, an oversized door.

This dreamhouse really reminds me

of the Case Study Houses, which were also cube like.

You had these experimental homes that were like glass boxes,

like the Farnsworth House in Illinois.

So here are some clues that this might have been part

of a suburban development of cookie-cutter homes.

We see there's some brick and stone,

but the majority is wood siding,

and it's in this vertical pattern

which we call board and batten siding.

Let's look inside.

So you open it up and everything inside is cardboard.

We're gonna set it up.

Right away, I can tell this is modernist.

Clean lines, not very much fussy ornamentation.

You know, you don't see arms on the sofa, on the chair.

There are some pieces that are very closely resembled

designer pieces of the era.

The sofa really closely resembles the daybed

that George Nelson designed for Herman Miller.

You know, we have this Hi-Fi TV console.

By 1962, pretty much every home

in America would've had a TV.

You also have this bed.

Again, looks a lot like a designer piece of the era,

the Thin Edge bed by George Nelson for Herman Miller.

And also there's a real Scandinavian influence

in a lot of this modernist furniture with the bold colors,

the clean lines, and the warm wood accents.

This closet is empty here, but obviously a big part

of Barbie is the fashion, and there's no kitchen.

This is a radical idea for the 1960s.

This is a single woman. She's a homeowner.

She's not a housewife. She's college educated.

She obviously went to her state college.

She's more into books and magazines than being a mom.

This house is a lot about the cultural narrative

of leaving tradition behind

and making your own path in the world.

You can tell the designers here

were trying to make something new and different,

not your traditional doll house.

And we're gonna see a lot more of that in the next house

from the 1970s.

[upbeat music]

So our next house is the 1979 A-frame.

We've come a long way from the cardboard.

It's plastic and fantastic.

Right away you notice this A-frame shape,

big skylights, balcony, and these big window boxes.

So with this A-frame shape, the reference is a ski chalet,

and the design of the roof line was so snow and ice

wouldn't accumulate.

Starting in like the '60s, there was a total fad

to kind of make your own DIY affordable second home cabin

in this A-frame shape.

You also have motels, roadside rest stops,

and then it starts becoming part

of like a suburban home typology.

The color palette here is very, very 1970s: earth tones.

We've got the orange red on the roof,

we've got harvest yellow accents, avocado green furniture.

The colors are all referencing nature.

So what's really exciting, the A-frame opens up.

The intersecting roof lines really remind me

of Charles Moore's Sea Ranch.

This sofa hugely resembles the Togo sofa designed

by Michel Ducaroy.

It's low to the ground, very slouchy.

It's comfy, youthful,

and they are totally back in style right now.

So here's a little mid-century modern throwback.

It looks a lot like the chair that the Eames designed

for Herman Miller, which was the molded plastic side chair.

Everything about this house is forward thinking,

in touch with nature, but also there's designer furniture.

[upbeat music]

This is the 1990 dreamhouse, the Magical Mansion.

It's pink. It's huge.

It's four feet wide. It's a total status symbol.

On the exterior, you see these Doric columns.

All in all, I'd say it's a colonial two-story.

So Barbie being totally pink starts in 1977

with Superstar Barbie.

By 1990, it's firmly established

that Barbie's world is pink.

There's so many copycats

that Barbie leans into a signature color.

They wanna be the pink aisle in the toy store.

Pink and Barbie have become totally synonymous.

So we see here from the roof and the flat front,

it's a colonial two-story.

These Doric columns, they're very neoclassical,

referencing Greco-Roman forms.

Thomas Jefferson was a fan,

using them on the Virginia State Capitol.

But by the '90s, we think like affluent suburban home.

One thing I noticed right away

on the facade there's two different types of windows,

which you start seeing in McMansions.

So you see here the windows, Venetian Palladian.

Here, Tudor Bay.

Italian palace, British. Why?

This is the beginning of just going crazy

mixing together all these different architecture styles

in one house.

Later, you start seeing

like eight types of windows on one house.

We love this Barbie dreamhouse.

It's sparkly, it's pink, it's huge.

I feel like for a lot of little girls

this is the dream home.

Let's look inside.

[upbeat music]

Welcome to Barbie's dream home.

This is a return to a more traditional dollhouse,

and we see way more of these historical inflections

on the interior.

These dining chairs, they look

like Queen Anne or Chippendale chairs.

So we see evidence here of the floral explosion

that was happening in home decor.

For example, on the wallpaper, the pillowcases.

The stained glass windows here,

they're really reminiscent of Art Nouveau stained glass.

And it's a total mishmash of different periods.

By the year 2000, the average single family home

breaks 2,000 square feet.

So through the '90s and 2000s,

homes are just getting bigger and bigger.

That's really suggested by this huge dreamhouse.

This whole dream house is about status obsession.

It's a snapshot of the period.

Next, I'm gonna show you the 2021 house.

This is the 2021 Dreamhouse.

Right away, I noticed the flat roof line.

So we're like talking return to modernism here.

Neomodernism.

The clean lines and the geometric shapes,

but very large and ostentatious, totally California.

It reminds me of the mansions they have on Selling Sunset.

It's a wheelchair accessible elevator.

So there were some elevators in older dreamhouses,

but this is the period

that the wheelchair can fit on the elevator.

Let's look inside.

[upbeat music]

So Barbie's a DJ now.

This house is all about experiences you can Gram.

It's very coded as single girl again.

We have a lot of spaces that are about hosting your friends.

It's bright, airy spaces, spiked with eye-catching

retro design pieces, and that is a style of home decor

that's really emerged in the Instagram era.

This could be an infinity pool,

you know, with an ocean view,

but also everything's about modularity.

It can also be a water slide.

This hanging chair specifically

it's a throwback to something like the hanging bubble chair

by Eero Aarnio from the 1960s.

So we see a lot of pink here,

but it's very different from the 1990 mansion.

It's a sporty pink.

It's active. It's about motion.

It's a stronger, bolder.

This is a snapshot of what the modern girl wants in 2020.

With the 2021 dreamhouse, we see something

kind of full circle with the original 1962 dreamhouse

with a house for entertaining, this independent spirit,

probably in somewhere like LA,

in this modern style and flat roof.

[upbeat music]

You can really tell that each dreamhouse is representative

of what's popular in architecture and design in that period.

And it also tells kind of a cultural narrative

of what's going on.

There are so many dreamhouses,

and each one is really remarkable

in how the designers incorporated these architectural trends

and elements from the period.