Fairies are notoriously picky about their houses. Like birdhouses designed to attract a particular kind of bird, fairy houses must be situated just so in order to lure a three-inch-tallfairy to a new home.
Edward Heys, of Bennington, Vermont, constructs these tiny dwellings to scale for the fairies, at 1:20 scale.
“Fairies hoard items, not unlike myself,” says Edward. “They are collectors of shiny things. Each house could have shells, rocks, marbles, baskets (which are upside-down acorn caps), and they have lighting … because fairies are not in the Dark Ages.”
Every house includes a table and two chairs. (The chairs are made from small, dried sticks glued together. The style is what Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley might have dreamed up if they’d had a baby.) His current series of houses features fireplaces. And books. Lots and lots of books.
The books began as an afterthought in an earlier series, but now his houses are crammed with bookshelves. “I was working on a house with a bookcase and making little books. I had such a blast that I decided everything needs a book,” he says.
While most of Edward’s “supplies” are natural items that he’s gathered, he also works pieces of history into the homes. Bits of wooden trim came from real houses being dismantled nearly 40 years ago back in Ohio. “The oak trim in some of the pieces was from trees that were probably cut from old growth forests, so some of the wood I have used could be 300 years old,” he says.
Some of the table columns are made from sewing thread spools his mother once used. His wife, Sue, crochets the scatter rugs. His son, Ash, laser-cuts tiny detailed wood pieces. The finials jutting from the rooftops are driftwood collected from Lake Erie during trips home to visit family. Corkscrew hazel, donated by friends, has been transformed into some of the newer finials.
His favorite part to make is the roof. “I have more fun with those silly shingles,” he says. “I pick up pieces of birch bark off the ground — pretty rotted — then I clean them off, soak them for a week, then scrub them down a couple of times.” He presses the bark flat, cuts it into uniform strips, then trims each one down into individual shakes. It’s painstaking work. The kind of painstaking work that goes into every inch of every house. Each house takes about six weeks to complete from start to finish.
Edward is still relatively new to making fairy houses. He started in 2022, when Covid still had a grip on everyday life. During a visit, his grandkids wandered a “fairy trail,” where tiny fairy houses were tucked away for visitors to discover. “Sue pulled me to the side and said, ‘You realize what you are making for the kids this year?!’”
Turns out, she was right.