AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
At the Art Institute of Chicago, there are 68 rooms showcasing interior design through the ages, but you won't wear yourself out taking them all in because they're miniature. As member station WBEZ's Minju Park reports, the real effort comes at least twice a year when museum experts have to clean all the teeny sofas and lamps and knick-knacks to keep them all looking good.
MINJU PARK, BYLINE: The rooms are a show of beautiful and painstakingly detailed craftsmanship created by Narcissa Niblack Thorne. Thorne was a Chicago resident from one of the city's wealthiest families who traveled widely and created and collected miniatures. Curator Kit Maxwell says Thorne assembled a group of skilled artisans in Chicago during the 1930s to help her create the rooms she left to the museum, each about the size of a shoebox.
KIT MAXWELL: She was adamant that they were not doll houses. They were not something, in her words, that a child could destroy. But they would educate and inform visitors on the principles of good taste and interior decoration.
PARK: Each of those miniature rooms, on a scale of 1 to 12, reflects the interior design trends of a particular place and time period, like one room set in London in the 1930s.
MAXWELL: This is so fabulously of its moment. You can see the cocktail set on the coffee table. There is a copy of Country Life magazine on the sofa, and there's a card game set up on the table by the open window. The adjacent dining room is filled with late Art Deco-style furniture.
PARK: It takes a trained eye and steady hand to care for all of the intricate details.
JONATHAN WORCESTER: The primary strategy is patience.
PARK: That's Jonathan Worcester, the department's primary art handler. He says - why patience?
WORCESTER: It can take anywhere from an hour to three hours to clean an individual room.
PARK: Worcester and a co-worker clean all 68 rooms two to three times a year.
WORCESTER: There are so many people who are circulating through the gallery, and inevitably dust will land somewhere. So it's an aesthetic issue as well as just a preservation issue.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOOLS JOSTLING IN CART)
PARK: Worcester's primary workstation is a plastic utility cart full of an arsenal of cleaning tools.
WORCESTER: We have paint brushes of various densities and lengths that I use, just primarily to get all of the generalized soot out - anything from 4 inches to about a millimeter.
PARK: He also uses spatulas and tweezers.
WORCESTER: In addition to that, my handy blower is available to be able to loosen anything from any crevices within the rooms.
(SOUNDBITE OF AIR PUFFING)
PARK: He begins cleaning slowly, going step by step.
WORCESTER: There's a keyed mechanism that lifts open the glass front, and I'm able to prop it up.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS FRONT OPENING)
PARK: Then he dismantles the room, removing the tiny furniture, including delicate chandeliers with dozens of small dangling beads.
WORCESTER: Yeah. Getting this thing off the ceiling is actually really complicated.
PARK: He holds his breath as he brings one out and sets it on the cart.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL SCRAPING)
WORCESTER: (Laughter).
PARK: Then it's on to cleaning the interior of the rooms.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRUSHING)
PARK: Worcester references photographs of the rooms so that he can replace the objects exactly as they were before.
WORCESTER: As you can see, it can be a bit repetitious.
PARK: And with all the brushing and cleaning, he has to get into a very specific frame of mind.
WORCESTER: Typically, I will sort of listen to an audiobook - you know, reach whatever meditative state is necessary (laughter).
PARK: In order to focus on the little things in life in the Thorne miniature rooms.
For NPR News, I'm Minju Park in Chicago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADRIAN BERENGUER'S "LITTLE THINGS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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