Portraits of 19th century rulers line the walls of the drawing room, their faces no bigger than a fingernail. The letters “VR” have been shot into the wall, but the bullet holes are barely bigger than pin pricks. Inch-long calvary swords hang above the door.
The entire building, a replica of 221 B Baker Street, from Mrs. Hudson’s first-floor rooms to the apartments of the world’s most famous detective, stands only about three feet tall atop the workbench in Joe Balsanek’s basement.
For the past three years, Balsanek has been restoring the scale model of 221B Baker Street, the home of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, for the University of Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections.
The refurbished model is set to be returned to its Andersen Library home next year at the University of Minnesota.
The model, which came from a previous Sherlock Holmes memorabilia collection before being donated to the University, was damaged from a water leak within the collection during the pandemic. The damage was so bad, Balsanek’s initial estimate of the project was that he would be “better off building it from scratch,” and didn’t want to take on the project at all.
Despite his trepidation, Balsanek, who has been restoring doll houses across the country for the past 15 years, eventually agreed, with the stipulation that he would not be given a deadline on the project.
Over the last three years, Balsanek has labored on the minutiae of the tiny rooms from the patterns of wallpaper to the wood trim to the faux-brick façade that would be facing Baker Street in London.
“It’s an art not a craft,” said Balsanek.
When he received the model initially, Balsanek separated out the floors in order to access each room. From there, he peeled back wallpaper, pulled up flooring and removed windowsills, many of which were too damaged to salvage.
“It was kind of like building it from scratch,” said Balsanek.
Due to the historical nature of the model, however, the focus was on repairing the existing structure versus creating a new one.
The extent of the damage required Balsanek to indeed fully rebuild some aspects of the model, from the stairway up from Mrs. Hudson’s downstairs apartments to many of the Balsam wood doors complete with doorknobs barely larger than the head of a pin.
“Half the doors had to be rebuilt from scratch,” said Balsanek.
Those new additions had to then be matched to existing refurbished elements so as to not stand out. For example, Balsanek redyed the drapery across the windows of the model to ensure the color remained the same.
The model, like many dollhouses, is a scale of one foot per inch. That size means that the Victorian trim around windows and in corners is about 3/4 of an inch tall, with doors thinner still. The upstairs toilet stands barely two inches.
This diminutive scale requires similarly diminutive tools from shrunken hammers to Phillips head screwdrivers so small that Balsanek uses wax to affix even smaller screws because they are too difficult to hold in place otherwise.
“It’s not like you are going in your garage and opening up a toolbox,” said Balsanek.
Due to the historical nature of the project, Balsanek ended up researching what would make sense for the apartments, from Victorian wallpaper to a period-accurate hand railing.
Balsanek estimated that he spent a few months scrutinizing wall paper patterns, making photocopies and coordinating color schemes between rooms before eventually ordering the final patterns from England.
“I could do some of that work sitting in an easy chair,” joked Balsanek.
Balsanek began restoring dollhouses after his daughter found a dollhouse at a garage sale and asked him to refurbish it for his granddaughter. Balsanek had previously worked at Hamline University as a set designer, where he created miniature set models for directors, so the skills of small-scale construction were already familiar to him.
Balsanek credits the Edina miniaturist store Little Enchantments with starting him down the path of dollhouse renovations.
The owners of Little Enchantments saw Balsanek so frequently when working on his granddaughter’s dollhouse, they asked if he would take commissions from others seeking refurbishment help. After he agreed, the demand was nearly instant.
“The phone was really ringing off the wall,” said Balsanek, which eventually led to opening his own miniaturist store in downtown Hastings, which has since closed.
Most of those projects were restorations varying from other unique models to people buying kits who then sought help with the precise and tiny work.
Balsanek doesn’t have an exact number of projects he’s worked on but it numbers in the hundreds. Those projects can last anywhere from a few months to multiple years, but 221B Baker Street stands alone.
This project will be the longest he has ever worked on because the severity of the water damage to the entire structure was the “worst I’ve ever had to work on,” said Balsanek.
The model is set to return to the University of Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections, one of the world’s largest collections of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia housed at the Andersen Library at the University. That collection features some 60,000 books, journals “and a wide variety of other forms through which the transformation of the Holmes character from the printed page to a cultural icon can be traced,” according to its website.
The model is expected to be housed in a life-sized replica of Holmes’ sitting room complete with original furniture and battery-powered lights.
Balsanek estimated that he replaced about half of the original façade. That new façade, bricks made of hardboard and hand-plastered with stucco, sports a shiny new name plate proudly proclaiming “221 B Baker Street,” which came directly from Trophies Plus in Hastings. And next to it, now a part of the model’s history is another plaque: “Restored by Designs Plus Joe Balsanek 2025.”