Missing Sherlock Holmes dollhouse returns to U collection, the largest of its kind in the world

Warped walls. Stained wallpaper. Tiny pieces of damaged furniture.

A beloved miniature replica of Sherlock Holmes’ apartment sustained serious water damage in 2020 when an overhead pipe in the University of Minnesota room where it was displayed dripped on it.

“You name it — everything went wrong with it,” said Joe Balsanek, a Hastings resident who restored the structure. “It was a real disaster.”

The little house is one of more than 60,000 items in the U’s Sherlock Holmes Collections, the largest of its kind in the world.

Repairs on the dollhouse started over three years ago. The project was completed in November and will return to the U’s Anderson Library, the collection’s home, in the coming weeks; it will be back on display in the beginning of the new year.

“Once we discovered the damage, then it was, all right, what do we need to do to get it restored and back to normal?” said Tim Johnson, the recently retired curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections.

The repairs cost $10,000, which came from endowment funds.

Johnson said he believed it was constructed in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It was made by Dorothy Rowe Shaw, the wife of John Bennett Shaw, who once had the world’s largest private collection of Sherlockania, as the memorabilia is called. The U’s Sherlock Holmes Collections started in 1974; Bennett Shaw donated and sold his collection to the U in 1993, Johnson said.

Rowe Shaw was part of a group of Sherlockian enthusiasts, Johnson said, who enjoyed creating minuscule versions of scenes and places featured in the Sherlock Holmes books and short stories, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle starting in the 1880s. The last tale was published in 1927.

The lower level is the apartment of Mrs. Hudson, the landlord, while the upper floor is where Holmes and Watson lived. They met their clients in the famous sitting room and had their own bedrooms there, too, Johnson said.

“Based on what I saw in the photographs, he did a beautiful job,” said Johnson, who hasn’t yet seen the refreshed house. “I’ve got three boxes filled with furnishings that we took out. ... I will be putting those back into the miniature once we’ve set up.”

The house was worth repairing because the Shaws were very well-liked and known in the Sherlockian community; they did so much to promote the stories, Johnson said.

Balsanek has been repairing dollhouses since 2007 or 2008, he said. He loves how detail-oriented it is, and it hearkens back to his work at Hamline University, where he was a professor in charge of theater design. At Hamline and many other theaters, he made small models of sets, which is similar to the dollhouse work.

He once had a dollhouse repair shop in downtown Hastings but now he works part-time at home.

“I’ve become the regional [and] national go-to for dollhouse restoration,” he said.

He took the dollhouse completely apart and fixed or replaced the walls, floors, ceilings, windows and doors, plus the exterior, roof and some furniture, too. Putting it back together was “like a puzzle.”

“It was a very slow and tedious process,” he said.

“You don’t just say, ‘Oh, well, let’s go with this one,’ ” he said. “You kind of have to think about it, and then you have to compare the wallpaper in one room to another room.”

Floors — some wood and others tile — also took a long time, he said.

Finally, he rehung the diminutive paintings and maps. Using a punch pin, he reproduced the tiny bullet holes spelling out “VR” in one wall, which Holmes made with his gun while sitting in an easy chair, Balsanek said, adding that the incident is recounted in the stories. (The initials stand for “Victoria Regina” — the queen of England in the era the books are set.)

The updated version of the 12-room dollhouse has battery-powered electricity in its diminutive sconces and lamps, since the original wiring couldn’t be fixed, he said. The batteries are pill-sized.

Balsanek said he didn’t know that the U had the world’s largest collection of Sherlockania before he agreed to do repairs. He soon realized he and the house were part of history.