The Wooden Doll family

Alexander Girard, born in 1907 New York and raised in Florence, Italy, spent his later decades in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and his wife made their adobe house into a laboratory for bold experimentations and amassed a collection of 106.000 pieces of folk art from all over the world, Alaska, Mexico, Poland, Ethiopia, Japan and more. Rolf Fehlbaum, son of the Vitra’s founding family, later described the home as the most fascinating house he had ever seen in the United States.

The Wooden Dolls by Alexander Girard are a large family of wooden figures representing human and animal characters. Girard designed them in 1952 for his own use as decorative objects in his Santa Fe home. These originals, which are part of the Girard estate in the holdings of the Vitra Design Museum, served as models for the current re-editions. Precisely replicated down to the last detail, the many different Wooden Dolls are still fabricated and painted by hand today, just like the vintage pieces by Alexander Girard. And even if the differences between them are only very slight: each wooden figure is a unique, individual product, truly one of a kind.