Frances “Franny” Glessner did not make a good cup of coffee. This was not because Franny lacked the time, resources, or even the right kitchen. The coffee her own mother declared “a failure” came from a space where Franny, age nine, was only playing at domesticity (231). From within her log cabin playhouse, Franny cooked with the paid companion hired by her parents. If Franny had shortcomings as a hostess, visitors might easily forget them when taking in their surroundings. Franny’s 1886 cabin, built from the designs of Isaac Scott, was an elaborate, “appealingly antiquated addition” to the Glessner’s large New Hampshire estate (230).

The excess of Franny’s playhouse in the woods was exceptional but not singular in the Gilded Age. In Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood, Abigail A. Van Slyck provides an in-depth history of a number of cottages, cabins, miniature estates, and other small worlds made for children to enjoy while living on wealthy estates. Van Slyck argues that playhouses for the privileged were excessive and fanciful by design, but not frivolous. A cabin such as Franny’s was not simply a space for carefree fun, nor was it strictly functional. For both royal children and American “royals,” a playhouse offered a break from “the formalities” of their lives (151). By offering diversions for their children, elite parents were not interested in escapism so much as a reinforcement of norms. As Van Slyck shows, elites regarded playhouses as integral to their social performances and to the systems they sought to reproduce through their children.

Van Slyck bookends her study with royal experiments, starting with Osborne (the Swiss Cottage), on the Isle of Wight, and ending with the Royal Lodge (Y Bwthyn Bach), located in Windsor Great Park. The intervening chapters chart the rise of an American elite in the form of several Gilded Age families, including the Vanderbilts. Van Slyck skillfully demonstrates how playhouses were intentionally designed as tools for instilling a specific sense of place and duty. While her study is tightly focused, it more than delivers on its promise to reframe our understanding of the architecture that informed rich children’s lives. Generally, the voices of children of the past are hard to find. By extension, Van Slyck argues that the archive is not as robust for these structures, but her work is rigorous and creative, and she has mined her sources extraordinarily well.

The book is not an exhaustive study of any one family’s retreat, nor is it a history of every kind of play space built over an eighty-year span. Instead, Van Slyck focuses on a small number of illustrative landmarks and uses a large number of illustrations and photographs. While architects and craftspeople built playhouses “on a small scale” for wealthy children, they did not make everything within them “child-sized” (11). Adults were often very much a part of the functioning and care of these spaces, and so they, too, needed to fit. Van Slyck is primarily interested in elite conceptions of these spaces, but she also incorporates the views of other adults when possible. After all, servants had to navigate the smaller worlds made for their charges, and it was only under the careful eye of paid staff that children could play or dabble in either domestic work or rustic activities.

Van Slyck also takes particular care in studying how changing gender roles shaped perceptions and uses of these play spaces. While some elite parents in the late nineteenth century adopted the idea of “innate play instincts,” play took on new meaning during the Progressive Era, and more adults became invested in the idea of directing play. While the work of managing and studying play took place in highly public arenas for most children (think baseball fields and playgrounds), for the wealthy, “the playhouses themselves provided the scripts for this seemingly self-directed play” for children (201). Playhouse “performances” “were gendered in surprising ways” but not always neatly divided along lines of gender (201). In the chapter on “Practicing Domestic Virtue,” Van Slyck suggests that with widening access to playhouses, the “scripts” became narrower and aimed at daughters regarded as “less central” to their families’ ambitions (250).

Outside of the one percent, Shirley Temple’s 1930s playhouse presents one of the more fascinating case studies in the book. Temple, a working child actor, needed a place to rest amid her hectic schedule. Temple’s Hollywood “playhouse” was in fact a fantastical “four-room bungalow” (273). Temple’s play space was thrust into the spotlight to meet public pressure for her to have “a good childhood” (274). When Temple got married, “her mother renovated the dollhouse into a full-time home for the newlyweds” (278). For many reasons, Temple’s special retreat was really “not a playhouse at all” but rather a way of hiding that “her play was, in fact, work” (280). Temple’s playhouse presents a compelling inversion of other studies in the book; it also marks an endpoint. By the 1940s, “splendid cottages and playhouses” were no longer just the purview of someone such as Temple, “America’s princess” – or Princess Elizabeth herself (312). The coveted cottages, vehicles for “the reproduction of class privilege,” became “objects of desire for middle-class” people with their own “adult concerns” (312).

A key contribution of this book is the author’s exploration of how these elite cultural spaces moved into mainstream culture. Even as Van Slyck makes a strong case for moving away from the idea that playhouses were frivolous to the people who made or played with them, there are elements of these playhouses that are, in fact, beyond excessive, and to some degree, obscene. Such extravagance can be understood without justifying it. While many young people toiled in mills and mines, some of the adults who benefited from their labors made their own children’s lives not just comfortable but surreal. Wealthy adults ensured that even when their children were in spaces where they could learn basic skills through play, there was yet another layer of privilege in the form of suspended disbelief and, typically, a paid staff person. Playhouses provided relief for children living under the immense pressures of the social order that many adults demanded for their class. It is not this book’s goal to contrast a small but abundantly outfitted child’s cottage with a contemporary tenement. But educators and critical consumers of histories of this period may want to do just that, and to remember that such experiments in domesticity came at a cost to other children.

Due to both their size and intended occupants, it has been easy for scholars to ignore or dismiss Gilded Age playhouses. Van Slyck argues that even a playhouse on the periphery of a great estate was designed and placed with intention. For families such as the Glessners, tolerating a weak cup of coffee in a carefully constructed cabin was not a deviation from their rituals but in fact another way of affirming where they belonged.