In the depths of the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago is a carpeted room with windows into 68 gorgeously decorated rooms—each built to the scale of 1 inch: 1 foot.
The rooms were a project by Narcissa Nidblack Thorne, who married the heir to a department store fortune. As a child, she'd always loved dolls and dollhouses; as an adult who traveled extensively through Europe, she made it a hobby to collect miniature furniture and accessories.
To house her collection, Narcissa drew designs for several rooms to hold her treasures, and commissioned cabinetmakers to construct them. It was 1932, and unemployed craftsmen were plentiful. Over time, though, the project became increasingly ambitious. In 1936 she was asked to create a miniature version of the library at Windsor Castle to mark the (ill-fated) coronation of Edward VIII. Inspired to create more facsimiles of real rooms from some of Europe's most impressive castles, museums, and homes, she hired architects and members of the Needlework Guild of Chicago to get the designs just right, down to the tiny textiles and carpets.
The Thorne Miniature Rooms are beautiful examples of painstaking craftsmanship, and of architecture and interior decoration from specific places and periods: French and English styles from the 1500s through the 1920s; and American style from 1875-1940. They were featured at exhibitions and art museums throughout the U.S. before finally settling at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Two more are in the collection of the Indianapolis Children's Museum and the Kaye Miniature Museum in LA.) The collection at MAIC, though, is thought to be the largest collection of miniature rooms in the world.