“It was a house that was meant to celebrate all the things that the gods on Mount Olympus might celebrate: beauty, pleasure, excess. It was a fantasy of indulgence, a place to lounge and eat grapes off the stem and host raucous parties.” A dream project for any interior designer, surely, and in fact, that’s quite literally what it was. Interior designer Avery Cox spends her professional life decorating houses in her home state of Texas and all over the United States, but when she was asked to create one of a group of doll’s houses to be auctioned off as a fundraiser in Houston, she saw an opportunity to incorporate some of those dream ideas that have never quite made it off the moodboard.

Each of the eight designers tapped to make a doll’s house for the auction received the same basic shell of a house, with 12 rooms and a simple, modern exterior. “It was up to us to come up with a client, a location and a theme,” explains Avery, “so we decided this was the home of a demigod and a demigoddess, and it would be a villa on an island somewhere in the Aegean Sea.” Each member of her team took responsibility for a couple of rooms in ‘Villa Mare’, which ranged from a double height courtyard (created with a bit of ‘minor architectural excavation’ from the centre of the house) to a ballroom (or ‘playspace for celestial beings’, as Avery describes it).

The gallery space is wallpapered in Brunschwig & Fils’ ‘Rayure Lione’ in Chocolate. Styrofoam blocks wrapped in marbled paper serve as plinths and shelves for ‘artworks’ from Etsy.

Although the design of the house became a testing ground for schemes Avery would love to do in real life, there were some key differences in conceptualising how a doll’s house would work. “When you’re in a house, you’re only really in one room at a time,” she says, “whereas looking at this doll’s, we wanted it to make sure that it felt balanced when you’re looking at the full house from a distance. ”It had to draw you in and make an impact with colour and scale. It was kind of a mind bender to get there, but we did.”

Sourcing for the house was one of the most fun parts of the project. A few pieces are actual doll’s house furniture from Etsy, but Avery and her team had to use their ingenuity for much of the decoration. Samples from textile houses make up the wallpaper and flooring: for example, an approximation of stone tiles in many rooms was achieved by using Elitis’ palm-fibre-inspired ‘Matières Végétales’ wallcovering as flooring. “If you used this in a real house it would read very small scale and textural, but in a doll’s house it looked to me like the stones of ancient Rome,” laughs Avery. Fun pieces of costume jewellery by Kendra Scott became light fittings, and column-shaped candlesticks became actual exterior columns. The pictures on the walls are largely by Picasso (Avery pictured her demigod couple as patrons of the artist), ingeniously cut from an exhibition catalogue, while a postcard of the Acropolis glued to a window stood in for the imagined view.

The walls in the living room are covered in Porter Teleo’s ‘Fluid Tones’ wallcovering in FT13, while the sofa is upholstered in Lee Jofa’s ‘Pulitzers Pride’ in seafoam. The curtains are Manuel Canovas’ ‘Fiorella’ in tilleul.