EVERY child has dreamt of being small enough to fit into a doll’s house. In Japan they are making the dream come true.

Estate agents have been instructed to sell two homes that are exact copies of dolls’ houses and it is adults, not children, who are queueing up for them.

The homes are adult-sized versions of Sylvanian Families dolls’ houses, and the buyers can even choose scaled-up copies of the furniture. The price is scaled up, too. While “Wooden Lodge” and “House on the Hill” sell for less than £100 each, the full-size versions cost 33 million yen (£160,000) and 44 million yen.

Epoch, the toy company, has built the full-size homes to tap into the fanatical following that Sylvanian Families has in Japan.

Great care has been taken to ensure that the homes look exactly like the dolls’ houses. The developers have even re-created the plastic laminated wood-effect planks that on the miniature houses were intended to mimic weatherboarding. Sylvanian Families has a strong adult following in Japan. The homes have been built three miles away from the GrinPa Sylvanian Village theme park at the foot of Mount Fuji, a 90-minute drive from Tokyo, and are designed to appeal to city dwellers looking for a rural holiday home.

The smaller of the two properties sold the day that it went on the market and the bigger house has several would-be purchasers competing to buy it. The toymakers plan to expand the development into a Sylvanian housing estate. The designs of the range are based on the Japanese romanticised idea of what it is like to live in the English countryside.

Yvonne Pestridge, of Flair Leisure, which distributes the toys in Britain, said that the homes must be magical for collectors. “Nothing nasty ever happens in Sylvania, so it’s a perfect fantasy world,” she said.

“We have plenty of adult collectors here, too. Who knows? Perhaps it won’t be long before we get our own adult-size doll’s house.”

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