Right here in Mexico, you will find a beautiful mansion complete with a grand staircase, which is sure to wow. Warm lighting spills a soft honey glow from every room, inviting you in to see what treasures lie inside. A crystal swan perhaps? A real ash-wood baseball bat?

All 15 rooms are skillfully wallpapered, decorated with such care and attention to detail. If you look closely, you’ll notice that every single piece of furniture, right down to the piano, is Victorian, hand carved in the Queen Anne style.

Tucked away safe and sound at the top of the stairs, up against the large windows at the Audrain County Historical Society’s Graceland Museum, is this show-stopping dollhouse behind velvet rope.

Dick and Phyllis Bowen

Richard (Dick) Bowen and his wife Phyllis have lived in Mexico for about 40 years now. They met in Hannibal where they both grew up and attended the same high school but being two years apart, they did not really associate.

“My best friend and her best friend were friends and they got married,” remembers Dick.

In 1957, the newlyweds had invited Dick and Phyllis to their thanksgiving dinner where they instantly connected.

“A few months later we were married!” says Dick. “Now it’s 66 years later and we’re still married.”

Dick holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Mizzou. He graduated in 1958 and returned to Hannibal where he married Phyllis and took a job at the Universal Atlas Cement plant. He worked there for five years when he was transferred to Birmingham, AL. The Bowens lived in Alabama for five years before Dick accepted a job with A.P. Green and moved to Mexico, MO.

The Bowens felt right at home here in Mexico.

“We made good friends,” says Phyllis. “Small town, everybody knew everybody; it’s been great.”

Currently, they live at Teal Lake Senior Living but the Bowens raised their family just up the road.

“317 Jefferson Rd.” they say fondly in unison before sharing a laugh.

The Bowens have two children together, Richard who is retired and living in Portland, OR and Anne, their daughter who lives in Pacific, MO.

Phyllis was a homemaker and Dick was an engineer for A.P. Green from 1968 to 1998.

“I ended up as Director of Engineering,” says Dick. “I went in as a project engineer.”

He remembers his time at A.P. Green fondly. He loved his job heading the engineering department and liked the company a lot. Dick used to travel quite a bit overseeing construction within the facilities at all 24 plants. That was, until they sold the company.

“When they sold it, I could either get fired and get my severance or I could just retire and I was getting close to retiring anyway,” says Dick who was almost 62-years-old at the time.

He asked to be fired and took his 6-month severance package.

A ‘piece of crap’ secretary cabinet

Dick created the dollhouse for his daughter Anne when she was just a child. Back then, the 12 bedroom colonial was pretty bare-bones; just a few rooms, the occasional piece of cheap furniture and Anne’s dolls.

“She played with it for a while and then Phyllis took it over and said she wanted to fix it up a little bit,” says Dick.

So, in 1978, he took his wife to a dollhouse show in St. Louis and told her to pick out a couple of things to furnish their miniature home. The first thing to catch Phyllis’ eye was a secretary cabinet listed at $35.

“I said, ‘Well that looks like a piece of crap.’” says Dick. “And it was,” Phyllis confirms.

And as they stood there at the dollhouse show, secretary cabinet in hand, Dick began doing the math, multiplying that $35 across 12 rooms.

“I thought, ‘I’ll be broke by the time we buy furniture for all these rooms!’,” says Dick incredulously.

He knew that with his engineering background, and his desire to not see all of his fishing trip money go to dollhouse furniture, he could make something better.

“That’s how it started,” adds Dick.

While the initial structure was 12 rooms, Dick added two wings for an additional three rooms and porch when Phyllis decided to make the dollhouse a hobby.

About a week after the secretary cabinet, Dick had purchased a small jigsaw and from then on was fully invested in miniature furniture making.

“When he made the furniture, he didn’t use anything but real wood,” says Phyllis. “There was no Balsa wood or anything.”

Dick bought all different types of wood including real ebony, though most of the furniture is made out of walnut and cherry wood.

“It was a fun hobby,” says Phyllis.

The 15-bedroom colonial at 317 Jefferson

Everything in the dollhouse is scaled (in inches) 12:1, so for every foot an item is, its miniature is one inch.

“You start with a block of wood, for chair legs it's about a half inch square, and then you start carving until you get the shape right,” Dick explains. “Believe me, you can break several trying to do that.”

How long each piece took all depended on what he was trying to make… and how many he broke along the way.

All of his furniture was sanded and stained to mimic the vision in his mind and the style of the dollhouse.

Soon he had added a small table saw, miniature lathe, sander and other small woodworking tools to his collection and they started selling the pieces too but between the cost of materials and time spent on each project, it wasn’t exactly lucrative.

“I lost money on everything I made,” says Dick. “You were not in it for the money,” adds Phyllis.

The Bowens began to get recognised at the dollhouse shows and eventually he was getting special orders from fellow dollhouse enthusiasts.

“That was the start of us beginning to think we were in this too deep,” says Phyllis.

When it came to the dollhouse, they toed the line between business and pleasure for years. Dick genuinely enjoyed creating custom pieces and often only charged for materials, but he drew the line on large orders.

Dick’s most popular items were his baseball bats which he wanted to keep as authentic as possible so he used mostly ash wood.

Phyllis was responsible for all of the decorations, wallpapering and really anything fabric. According to Phyllis, about 90% of that dollhouse was made with their own two hands.

“She made all of the rugs, all the curtains, all of the dresses,” says Dick.

When it came time for the Bowens to move to Teal Lake and sell their house, they knew they wanted to find a good home for the dollhouse where it could be cared for and appreciated as they had. The new owners of their house didn’t have the room for it and neither did their children.

“We were really happy that the historical society said they wanted it,” says Dick.

The dollhouse is on display at the Graceland Museum in Mexico. It is truly a sight to behold when the lights, all wired by Dick, bring the house to life.

Even though they are both well into retirement and Dick claims not to remember a whole lot, one thing he will never forget is spending $35 on a “piece of crap” secretary cabinet that jump-started his decades-long hobby. In fact, he made every piece of wood furniture in that dollhouse except for that very first purchase.

As Dick continued to mull over the cost of the secretary table that started it all, Phyllis looked lovingly at her husband and with a smile said, “I threw it away.”