This Woman Upcycles Thrifted Plastic Dollhouses Into Elegant Haunted Mansions and We're Obsessed

Photo credit: Samantha Browning
Photo credit: Samantha Browning

From House Beautiful

If you thought Juli Steel's abandoned dollhouses were the most perfect Halloween decor, wait until you see this crafty mom's spooky miniature houses.

Recently Samantha Browning's all-black haunted house gained some traction on Facebook with over 100,000 shares and 25,000 comments. Users were not only impressed with the home's aesthetic, but also by the fact that she upcycled this home from a pink plastic dollhouse.

As she told Bored Panda, she picked up the original dollhouse for $8 while thrifting. Then, she picked up some matte black spray paint and acrylic paint and brought this cheery dollhouse to the dark side. Take a closer look, and you'll notice her intricate hand-painted floral accents on the house’s exterior. To further set the scene, she placed small doll-sized decorations around the home such as a tree, a toy car, as well as skeletons. She said she was inspired to complete this project after watching a woman on TikTok spray paint a wooden dollhouse black.

However, this sleek black dollhouse isn't the only dollhouse she's given a spooky facelift — she’s done two others that she also shared on her Facebook profile. "I found [these dollhouses] on the Facebook Marketplace for $25, but thought they were worth the money because the designs were really beautiful," she said. She also shared that she purchased another a dollhouse for $1, but hasn’t gotten a chance to work on it yet.



Browning also noted she works on houses anywhere from 5 hours to over 10 hours depending on the details. She explained that some of the houses she has worked on have such fine details molded into them that "you can really spend any amount of time changing them to fit the theme you’re going for." However, she added "the more houses I get, the more I try to change those items to make the piece completely different and grow from where I started."

Browning is not selling her creations and is currently just doing them for herself.

Want to see more stunning dollhouse transformations? Check out our Dollhouse Beautiful series! For this project, we gave 11 designers the same Victorian dollhouse and $500 to decorate it any way they wanted. The result? A whole lot of crazy glue, DIY-ed accents, and miniature accessories.

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