SO REAL

The artists, collectors, and escapists of the miniatures world have a home in Las Vegas

By Oona Robertson

Paris Renfroe leans over a worktable in his garage shop. An order just came in for an oval burlwood table with a pedestal base. The design is his own — sleek and warm and timeless. When finished, it will have the glow of something well crafted, with the artist’s touch visible in the hand-rubbed finish, the hand-sanded edge. It will take him about 20 minutes to build. The table will measure 2 1/2 inches high, which in 1:12 scale is equal to 30 inches.

Renfroe himself has never seen much distinction between the world of miniatures and the full-sized world, whose importance feels less and less firm the more time one spends immersed in other scales. “I don’t look at my miniatures as miniatures. I look at them as if I’m building full-sized furniture. The only difference is, I don’t make everything function,” Renfroe says. Miniature hinges, for example, tend to break. “You’ve got to realize the force of a full-sized person in 1-inch scale. For me, at 6 foot 2 inches, I’m 72 feet tall. I’m a giant. Can you imagine a giant opening a kitchen cabinet? He’s going to rip it off.”

Renfroe tends to play with scale like this as he’s speaking, zooming in and out to suit the needs of his current analogy. The images he takes of his miniatures — interiors that looked pulled out of design magazines — read as full-sized until Renfroe’s giant hand comes into the frame.

This emanating glow of reality, this refusal to see his miniatures as any less significant because of their size, is what makes him so good at what he does. After a decade in the business, he can calculate scale in his head, distinguish at first glance an amateur from an expert, and render detail with the finesse

SCALE ABILITY of a craftsman. Sometimes this means using the same material, like the burlwood veneer he will glue onto the plastic base of this table, but sometimes it means changing material to better convince the eye. A glass tabletop looks more lifelike in miniature if made using a thin sheet of acrylic.

Miniatures artists create detailed designs in dollsize proportions.

His shop is set up with the basic tools needed for furniture making, as well as drawers containing thin scraps of wood and plastic and images cut from magazines that he will frame to make tiny art — nothing is too small to be useful. On the table sit two works in progress, a house modeled after one in the movie Ex Machina , complete with a stone fireplace and working electric lights made from seed pods, and a display for model cars with a wall of 3-D-printed guns for a client in Abu Dhabi. Renfroe chooses his jobs carefully, preferring clients who love his work and want to collaborate on something original, instead of replicating their own home or one they’ve seen. “It doesn’t matter what the scale is, but we’re still discussing design, how things should function, how many rooms, where it’s going to be displayed. So, it really feels like something that I’ve always done, which is just had a passion for design,” he says.

Renfroe moved to Las Vegas in 2011, a time when dollhouse culture was diminishing, and the internet had not yet created a resurgence in the love of tiny things. Dollhouses were first brought to the United States by English colonists, who wanted to carry a small representation of their past with them. “They hired the same craftsmen who built their homes to make miniatures so that they would have this as a keepsake or maybe even as an architectural model to maybe build a new one,” Renfroe says. Through industrialization, dollhouses became toys, and a consumer culture sprung up around them. Wholesale shows, where owners of dollhouse, miniature, and hobby shops bought a year’s worth of inventory to sell at their stores, became industry standard. The Cottage Industry Miniaturists Trade Association (CIMTA) in Las Vegas ran 19792019. But the prevalence of brick-and-mortar shops and the popularity of dollhouse collecting had long been in decline. “I think what happened is, things died off in the ’80s because a lot of the people who had those collections or that had the deep pockets were just getting old and they were dying,” Renfroe says.

When CIMTA shut down, Renfroe and two other locals from the miniatures world,

Cindy Gonzales and Lisa Hicks, started a new show. They took a decidedly modern approach to the first International Market of Miniature Artisans, or IMoMA, which took place in 2020. “We didn’t want anything with dollhouse in it because, although you can use miniatures in a dollhouse, we didn’t want to be focused on that, because there’s so many other different genres and niches within miniatures as a whole,” Renfroe says.

These niches have only multiplied since 2020 because of COVID-induced quarantine, when confinement caused many artists to begin working in miniature and many people to seek sources of entertainment and levity on the internet. At this year’s IMoMA, “minfluencers” are coming in from around the country to meet and greet fans. One such minfluencer is Tonya Ruiz, whose Instagram account exploded in 2020, when she began a series of quarantine Barbies.

“One had insomnia, one was baking bread, one started a new hobby — you know, all the things we were all doing — overeating junk food, binge-watching TV,” Ruiz says. While some people in her community on #dollstagram put their dolls in fantasy worlds like midcentury living rooms, Ruiz prefers to create scenes of her daily life. “Mine is like a reality Barbie, my life in miniature,” she says. Indeed, people seem