The final stage of landscaping the Rosedale involved finishing the patio and adding a fence. The patio is made from “slate” (actually, plaster) flagstones. They’re textured with very slight color variation that seemed too dull to me, so I decided to spruce them up using the same technique I’ve used in the past with egg carton stone.

Using a “dry” brush with most of the paint dabbed on, I first added two shades of gray to the stones. You can hardly tell.

Next came brown, which is more obvious.

I kept at it with various shades, including the tan and purple of the house and shutters. I didn’t have any particular plan for how I wanted these to look, just wanted to give them some character while also making them “go” with the house.

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With the patio glued down, it’s time to get some greenery into the Rosedale’s yard. The other two dollhouses I’ve landscaped, the Fairfield and the puzzle house, had very colorful gardens with lots of different kinds of plants. For the Rosedale, my mom and I decided on a more subtle look, mostly green with only a few splashes of color.

I dug through my stash of Avon and Popular Imports resin furniture and found two friezes that fit well on the bumped-out sides of the house. I also had some green resin planters I bought years ago for a 1:12 house and never used. The tree in this photo is just there for a height reference at this point (I’ll say more about the tree further down).

Color-wise, the friezes weren’t quite right. I started by dry brushing black paint onto the white fencing under the plants, to grunge it up. (In the photo below, the one on the left is painted and the one on the right isn’t.)

Next I tried painting the edge of the frieze house-colored so it would blend in more with the stucco.

This made it look more like it belonged, but not as much as I wanted. The light blue is a color that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the house, which bugged me.

I sponged on the house color so a little bit of the light blue peeks through, but it’s mostly tan like the house. Here’s a before and after comparison.

It blends in much more now — almost getting lost — but to my eye that’s much better than the original contrast. I haven’t decided yet if I’m fully committed to these so they’re not glued on permanently.

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With the base finished, the next step in Rosedale landscaping was gluing down the patio. I don’t attach my houses to the base permanently, but I do glue down the landscaping elements, so I had to measure carefully and make sure the patio was properly centered.

When I first pulled out these flagstones, I intended to create a rectangular courtyard in front of the house. My dad and I spent a long time playing around with the various pieces (15 sets of a square, a long rectangle, and a short rectangle) to try to come up with a good pattern. Here were some of the contenders.

Initially I really liked the idea of using all the pieces, with a walkway on the left and a patio area on the right, but also needed to figure out what to do with the topiary planters. I was going to place one one each side of the walkway but my dad thought it was weird to have one topiary on the patio and one in the grass.

He suggested keeping the walkway on the left and using fewer flagstones on the right to make a smaller patio area on the right, so the topiaries would be on the grass, just behind the fence posts, on either side. I resisted it at first but after playing around a bit more I decided he was right. The benefit of this is that we now had more flagstones to play with, and came up with cleaner patterns for both the walkway and the patio.

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