The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures

How fun is this place? We were in awe of the tiny miniatures, and nostalgic over the retro toys. It was absolutely breathtaking. All of it. And only $ 5 per person. A real value! The gift shop had amazing toys at such reasonable prices too.

I had been wanting to go for long time and today was the day… My husband and I walked in and was happy with our experience. The employees were helpful and nice.

This was an absolute wonderful bargain for the whole family! We loved it! Kids ages 12 and 10, plus mom and dad. We spent a good hour or so there, could have spent longer, but we had other plans in the area. The toys followed a natural progression in age and were separated by decades. The kids loved seeing how their modern day favorites started out during mom and dads days of growing up (70’s & 80’s). It was also fun looking back at what grandparents called favorites!
The Miniatures area was equally fascinating. We couldn’t believe how tiny everything was and with such great detail! It was great to see everyday objects reduced to less than an inch in some cases… My only reason for not giving the museum a full 5 stars was because I would have loved more information in the miniature section. There were no placards, or little snippets of info by the miniature rooms of different time periods, nothing to state what you were looking at, who made it and what it was there for… I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent remodel I am reading about. It would have been nice if there had even been a docent around, or a tour option… All in all — free off street parking, $ 5 per person admission and all the time you want to look around — WELL WORTH IT!

Sadly in the spirit of modern curators the have put 90% of the exhibits they use to have so they can show a small portion of he collection in fancy cases and lights. I miss the old museum.

Ive heard they just reopened on Aug 1^st after 18 mths remodeling. The toys sections are fun, it feels like they give you the ticket to come back to your childhood time. Miniatures rooms are beyond expectation. Worth your time and money. Your kids will enjoy this as well. Tickets are free for kids under 4 and seniors. $ 5 for 5 and up. You won’t spend much but what you’ll see is more than that! Totally worth it

My daughter and I both adore this place. At almost three, the toys fascinate her the way you’d expect from a child, and at 36, some things fascinate me in a «wow, that’s really creepy and odd» sort of way.
I’ve heard they’re closing to expand until 2015. We will miss this spot in the interim.

It was a dream come true to visit here, finally, after reading about it online more than a year ago. It sure didn’t let us down, and everybody who works there are wonderful, too.

This was a nice departure from our typical KC routine. My hubby had found this place when seeking interesting things to do for our trip.
If you have children with you, you can Google a coupon for the place to get a child’s admission free. You can show the coupon on your phone if you don’t have a printer handy. I liked having this capability.
The name of the museum tells you exactly what to expect. It is a great place, and we were surprised at the collection. I must say that the first floor is really the best part of the museum. The second floor seems to be the less impressive parts of the collection, minus the marble collection. This is a really cool section, and we got a great lesson from a very nice young lady there. I’d never played marbles before, and think I may add it to my repertoire of parlor tricks.
Take an hour or so out of your travels here to come and see the place. I don’t believe that you’ll be disappointed.

amazing collection of toys from the 19^th century. this was a very enjoyable museum with a ton of stuff to see. two floors spanning many generations and decade’s. A one of a kind museum. kudos to the staff who put all these artifacts together, i hope they add more toys from the 80’s here (masters of the universe, alf, transformers, GI Joe) overall its worth your time, attention and money ($ 7) plenty of free parking

I really enjoyed this little museum located in a house on the UMKC campus. There are tons upon tons of dolls and toys. It really is very interesting to see how things change over the years and how creepy some of the children’s toys were in the olden days. No really, some of the older toys were things from nightmares.
I personally preferred the upstairs exhibits but my wife liked the down sitars better. I really loved the marbles and board game exhibit, it was nostalgic. My second favorite was the miniatures sections. I am so impressed by the detail put into each piece.
This is a great place for older children 7 years and up and adults who love TOYS!
FYI: UMKC students are admitted free with an ID and other students receive a discount.

***This toy and miniature museum is surprisingly big and the collection of miniatures is incredibly impressive (the very detailed miniature paintings are immensely detailed); their collection encompasses many time periods; the property is also very well maintained***
The Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City sits right next to the University of Missouri-​Kansas City. It is a nice area with lots of greenery. The building that houses this museum is also nice and surprisingly big. The size of the building really allows for a very impressive and almost overwhelming collection of toys and miniatures from many different time periods.
I would say the primary focus of this museum is the collection of miniatures. There is a wide variety of antique miniature houses from the 1600s to 1800s. You get a great variety of houses – some with a more dollhouse and play feel and others with an incredible amount of detail (especially in a time period where they might not have had some of the modern tools we have today).
While the antique miniatures are impressive (as well as very nicely maintained), the modern miniatures are on another level with an almost unbelievable amount of detail. You will find fully realized dining rooms with perfect detail down to the silverware. Beautiful animals, working tools, musical instruments, and miniature paintings are also on display.
The miniature paintings are very impressive. The detail and the use of color is astounding. Rooms displaying the artwork take on the feel of walking through a miniature Getty Center.
Most of the modern miniatures cover a wide range of architecture and you will see a lot of recognizable interpretations (like the Painted Ladies from San Francisco). The miniatures go beyond the US too; though their non-​US collection is not as extensive, they do have a nice little room dedicated to houses and tatami rooms from Japan.
Their collection of toys is good but definitely not as elaborate as their miniatures. They feature mostly antique toys, but you will find a very impressive collection of Star Wars toys and an even more impressive collection of Barbie dolls. The number of Barbie dolls they feature is impressive in itself, but even more impressive is how they display them. You get a nice timeline of America fashion and ideals as you walk through the room from the more Mad Men era of the 1950s-​early 1960s Barbies to the more free spirit late 1960s-​1970s and then the bright colors/​pop/​MC Hammer music of the 1980s.
The collection is very impressive and well maintained and the building is too. The building is very contemporary and clean with great directed lighting that really highlights the incredible detail of the miniatures. You also get very nice restrooms. And with a building housing so many antiques, you may worry about the rooms being stuffy, hot or musty, but the room temperature is nice and there are no unpleasant odors.
They feature a small staff of very pleasant and dedicated workers.
Prices are reasonable at $ 7 per person. There is a decent gift shop on site, which features a wide range of prices.
The Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City is a really unique and interesting museum. It showcases a type of art that you might not easily find elsewhere, which really makes this spot a one-​of-​a-​kind experience. Their collection is very impressive and the location is very well maintained (up to the standards of a very good metropolitan museum), which makes trips here educational and engaging as well as nice and comfortable.
This museum features its own free parking lot. It is very easy finding an open space.
For your information, taking photos inside the museum is not allowed.

You could not pay me enough money to be in this museum by myself. It’s full of awesome creepiness. I do not have one other toy & miniature museum to compare this to, therefore it gets five stars because I can’t imagine anyone having as large and impressive collection as this place does.
IT IS OVERWHELMING. I would suspect that one of these detailed doll houses could be looked at and analyzed for hours at a time, but when I’m surrounded room by room of hundreds of pieces of detailed, intricate small things, my mind almost explodes. We started on the *toy* side of things and wish we would have started on the *miniature* side first because the miniatures have such amazing details that my mind was already exhausted from the toy side.
This entire place is a case study of people with OCD. It’s a little crazy.
The one thing that I didn’t understand was the entrance into the museum. You walk into the entry and have to pay your fee to a person behind a glass window with the vented speaking hole before entering the building. Kind of an off putting high security feeling just to enter something with the words toy and miniature in the name!
I don’t know how many times I would visit this museum, but I am super excited to know we have this quirky little place in town.

A Barbie doll room which I’m convinced inspired a writer of the Simpsons to pen Smithers’ obsessive and strikingly similar collection of Malibu Stacey dolls.
A miniature harpsichord that you wish you could shrink into a Lego person, drag to the Louis XV miniature study and then play.
This really cool building houses several rooms of dolls, model houses, model trains and other curious for the 12 year old girl and/​or boy in all of us. Such cute scaled models of various objects allows you to leave feeling like a giant.
$ 7 — Adults
$ 6 — Students

I’m a good mom because I sometime do things, not because I want to do them, but to give my daughter joy. That is exactly what I had planned this last lazy Saturday afternoon. I heard about a special free day at the museum and as an added bonus, they were celebrating the swinging 1940s. The fun of the forties might make this «kid’s day out» a little more entertaining for me, I thought. Little did I know how amazing this dreamlike, whimsical place would be for me!
I simply cannot believe how many dollhouses are there! But boys, don’t let that scare you off because the miniatures are unbelievable and fun for everyone and there are marbles and star wars and toy soldiers, oh my! I just can’t believe the fanciful nature of the jam packed two stories. It was so much fun.
Would my fun come to end when we made it down to the gift shop by the exit? Surely I could snatch my daughter up and race to the door to save myself from the moment every parent dreads? The «can I have its» are the worst, especially when you are between paychecks. I am obviously a risk taker because I agreed to look and just see if there was anything affordable. Gift Shop, I love you. You had an adorable little set of silverware, just the size for a precious American Girl Doll, for $ 3.00. Perfect.

Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me…
Creepy, strange, weird, horrifying, whimsical, interesting, fascinating. Those are all appropriate words to describe this unique museum. The details of the miniatures are incredible especially for being ¹⁄₁₂^th or smaller of the actual size with 1 inch=1 foot. Some of the pieces were even designed to be fully functional — clocks, plumbing, lights, and even pistols!
Sitting at 33,000 square feet, this is the largest miniature museum in the Midwest and even features the largest collection of marbles I’ve ever seen. The museum sits inside the 38 room Tureman Mansion leased from UMKC, so admission is free to all UMKC students and staff. Otherwise, it is $ 7 for adults, $ 6 for seniors and all other students, $ 5 for children up to 12 years of age, and free for children younger than 5.
If you have an odd phobia of clowns and dolls like me, then the collection here will make you very squirmish. There’s an entire room dedicated to Ragedy Ann, and I pretty much had to run out of there. Georgiana, the oldest doll in the collection, even has glass eyes and real human hair. I kept getting flashbacks to the 2002 movie «Red Dragon,» the third installation of the original «Silence of the Lambs.»
Ugh…shudder. Why go to a haunted house for Halloween when you can go year-​round to the Toy and Miniature Museum?

«Twenty eyes in my head… they’re all the same»
It’s not likely that you’ll ever see me quoting Glenn Danzig in a Unilocal review again (that’s sort of a lie), but this was all that I could think of as I perused room after room in the old mansion that contains the Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City.
The eyes are everywhere. Always feel like somebody’s watching you? They are. Porcelain Dolls. Barbies. Teddy bears. Miniatures. Miniature miniatures. Miniature miniature miniatures (seriously, at one point you’re looking at things through a microscope. These people aren’t fooling). Hell, even the marble room technically is full of eyes, right? It’s mind boggling.
I feel like I can’t possibly absorb everything in just one visit and then write it all down in one review. Instead, I’ll try to capture the essence of the museum here and leave the haunted doll speculation (and more!) to next time.
I’m going to come clean here and admit I was in love with my dolls when I was a young’un. I can’t deny my conventional girlhood, as much as I embrace my youthful proclivity to play with bugs and ephemera. Joseph Cornell would probably agree that it’s all somewhat related, after all (I thought of Joseph Cornell constantly here).
I had Cabbage Patch Kids, a Madame Alexander baby doll, and yes, I was a girl who loved her Barbies, too. I didn’t have the Dream House or the swimming pool (with Barbies that tanned!) or that cool sports car, but my friends did. I just loved dressing her up in an array of fabulous outfits.
Barbie’s 50^th anniversary is the current special exhibit and it will not disappoint, showcasing the beloved doll throughout her every incarnation, including «Black Barbie.» That this came out in not 1965, but 1980, uhhh seriously… and «Hispanic Barbie» came out around the same time. Now we’re told that this is sold only in Latin American markets and is not called anything but «Barbie.» That’s some save, Mattel. I loved the center display of the designer collection Barbies, by such famed designers as Bob Mackie and Christian Dior, but the best thing for me is they have a Barbie FASHION PLATE station. I still bemoan the retirement of Fashion Plates, as these were one of my favorite toys as a kid. I could have lost myself in the Fashion Plate area, but there was much more to see.
They have a modest Star Wars collection that takes up a corner of a giant room where you just know they are dying to expand, but little boys of the 70s ain’t giving up their toys anytime soon, so I think that room is going to stay pretty bare.
Then there’s the spectacular dollhouse collection. You don’t have to be a dollhouse aficionado to appreciate this. One of my favorite things to do is to drive by spectacular homes and wonder what it would be like to live in such a place. Dollhouses give you a precious glimpse inside! I love imaging lives for houses and the people who live inside them. Even better, with historically accurate dollhouses (you better believe they have ‘em here!), you get living schemes of the past encapsulated into anything from a log cabin to a modest cottage to grand Victorian mansion.
There are rooms upon rooms filled with dollhouses as old as a couple hundred years. Sizes range from a miniature dollhouse (set up in a craft room of a dollhouse, of course!) to a 7-​foot masterpiece that features gas lighting and running water. There are also displays upon displays of all that goes into the dollhouses and a thorough explanation of how creating things according to scale works.
Talk about information and sensory overload. Like I said, this place begs multiple visits. And so I will return.

I had haunted dolls on the brain as we explored dimly lit rooms at the Toy & Miniature Museum of Kansas City. One of the scariest books that I remember reading as a kid was a supernatural mystery involving a haunted dollhouse. I felt the painted eyes of porcelain beauties following me through the museum.
My 5 year old seemed immune to the spook factor. He ran around in a constant state of excitement, pointing out oddities and peering through dollhouse windows into the miniature self-​contained worlds.
The museum’s collection is fascinating. The largest dollhouse stands nine feet tall and at one time may have had gas lights and running water! Victorian era dollhouses were used as teaching tools to prepare wealthy girls for their roles as wives and «household managers,» so a variety of domestic servant dolls are on display.
In addition to the dollhouses, the museum has antique toys of every variety: wind ups, trains, teddy bears, puppets, etc. There are also modern miniatures, astonishing in their detail and scale. The craftsmanship and artistry that must be involved in creating miniatures (some so tiny that they can only be viewed through a microscope!) boggles my mind. Upstairs there is an enormous display of marbles, a case full of Star Wars memorabilia, and a temporary exhibit chronicling the history of Barbie. It’s the kind of place you could could spend hours exploring and return to find something new again and again.
My husband commented that as you move through the museum’s collection, the toys become more commercialized. The soulful eyes of chipped china dolls on the bottom floor are in sharp contrast with the homogenized sex appeal of made-​in-​China Barbies on the top.
My only complaint is that the museum doesn’t allow photography. Ostensibly, they prohibit photography to protect the exhibits, but I don’t see how a digital camera with flash off would harm anything. Surrounded by the bizarre and the beautiful, I was itching to look through my lens. I respected the museum’s policy and only took photos when we were outside or in the lobby. Despite clearly posted signs, I saw plenty of other visitors snapping photos left and right.
The Toy & Miniature Museum of Kansas City is located on the UMKC campus in a renovated/​expanded 1911 mansion (built for successful local doctor Herbert Tureman). I don’t know if the Turemans ever commissioned a dollhouse replica of their elegant home, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one turns up some day in a forgotten attic corner, dusty and determined to tell its stories to the world.
Notes: The museum considers their collection most appropriate for ages 5 and up. I think younger kids (3+) would enjoy it, as long as they have a firm grasp of the «look but don’t touch» concept. The Barbie exhibit will be on display through July 4, 2011.
Read more on my KC Blog, The Family Unit (see Profile for link).

Another strange and surprising discovery in Kansas City. I had no idea this place existed until I saw it in some top 10 places to go in KC list on TripAdvisor.
It has room after room of doll houses and miniature furnishings for the doll houses. As mentioned in another review, though, it would have been nice if there were plaques of cards describing what year the pieces were made or how they were made… anything. It was just a GIANT collection of houses and teeny tiny pieces for the houses.
It was certainly interesting and amazing to see the detail that went into it, but I would have enjoyed it more if I could have learned more about it all.
Upstairs, they had a Barbie collection that was pretty awesome. Barbies dating back to the original and including all of the special holiday Barbies filled a pretty big room. I think this might be a temporary exhibit, though.
The baby doll room on the second floor smelled like my grandma’s basement and we didn’t stay long after that because allergies were flaring up.
It’s a pretty cool museum, but I would have enjoyed it much more with descriptions and information on what I was looking at.

I’m going to write a «short» review for the «miniature» museum.
The toys sections were consumed by doll houses and items that fill them. Although some are large and impressive, my interest «shrank» due to the repetition. The museum should renamed as «Welcome to the Dollhouse». There is section for marbles whose fan-​base must be getting «smaller» every day. Other toys sections were either «undersized» like the toy trains or omitted like building blocks.
The miniatures section was a «teeny» wonderland of the museum. The «small» details of the miniatures are insanely tedious. I was going a «little» cross-​eyed trying to see the «Lilliputian» craftsmanship.
At $ 7, the price is not «microscopic». For a Saturday afternoon, the museum was not very busy. I was a «bit» disappointed that there were no references to Munchkins. We are (almost) in Kansas after all.

The collection of the toy and miniature museum is huge. It is case after case, doll house after doll house, toy after toy… to the point you won’t want to see toys or miniatures for a good time after you leave. There is too much to look at for the size of the facility.
While the size of the collection remains a strong point, the weak point remains the lack of attention in properly displaying the collection. Many of the doll houses are unlit and too many of the pieces in the collection have little to no descriptive information about what the piece is or where if came from. If the museum concentrated more on being a true museum dedicated to learning and telling a story it would be a more fulfilling experience for visitors. Right now it is just a massive collection of interesting and sometimes creepy objects.

I love this museum, but it is quite possibly the creepiest place I have ever been in. Once I got past the thought of millions of little eyes watching my every move, I realized how cool the place is. It has an amazing collection of toys both old and new… dolls, dollhouses, stuffed animals, trains, cars, puppets… they have everything! The museum is set up in an old house with 30+ rooms and each room is packed to the brim with stuff. Every time you visit you’ll always find something that you didn’t see the last time.
My personal favorite are the dollhouses – there are hundreds of them and they’re all different sizes. I swear at least one of them is bigger than my apartment. I never had a dollhouse when I was a little girl, so I love coming here to press my face against the glass and wish I had my own to play with. All the houses are beautifully furnished with tiny little furniture and dolls. Some of them even have electricity or moving parts.
There’s also a great gift shop – it’s small, but they have all kinds of goodies that you won’t find just anywhere. Great seasonal merch too.
Ooh, and there is one big case in the museum that is full of marionettes that is just horrifying – I can’t bring myself to walk by it, I hate the thought of seeing their little eyes following me! :shudders: