To plan our next trip, I'm thinking of designing my own color-coded map. There would be a color for countries known to have great art, a color for countries known to have great food, and a color for countries known to have great access to dollhouse miniatures or compatible items. By that logic, we might never get further than France, but... for people determined to frustrate themselves by trying to find dollhouses in, say, Vienna, here is my first installment of our European adventure.

Important vocabulary

--Puppenhaus (pl. puppenhausen): dollhouse

--Modellbahn: model railroad

--Modellbau: model building supplies in general

--Spielwaren: toy store

--Kunst: art, sometimes used in the name of craft stores

--Papier: paper, sometimes an indication that the store also sells craft supplies

Shopping

So far as we can determine, there is no bricks-and-mortar dollhouse shop in the entire country of Austria. Given the local obsessions with Mozart, Empress Elizabeth (Sisi), and the Baroque, there would seem to be unexploited opportunities here for roomboxes of palace interiors.

Reutter Porzellan (made in Germany) is widely sold at gift shops, typically at prices 50% lower than it can be found in the United States. Unless you desperately need a 1:12 commemorative plate of Sisi, don't hit the higher-priced souvenir shops between the Hofburg and Spanish Riding School until you've been to a little shop in the MuseumsQuartier at the corner of Mariahilferstrasse and Konigskloster gasse. (If I could find a name, I would, but we seem to have paid cash.) The selection is the best we saw in Vienna, and small dish sets were running about 4 Euros cheaper than in the palace-area gift shops.

Paper stores that sell craft supplies can be widely found outside the downtown ring. We stayed in the Neubau district and found tons of shops just by wandering around, interspersed with hopping on a streetcar and hopping off whenever a store looked interesting. Also thick upon the ground in this area are model railroad shops. It's very easy to drop a euro here and a euro there, here a euro, there a euro, everywhere a euro.

Less exciting for minis are the public markets, where dollar-store furniture tends to show up at a shocking 9 Euros (though the weekend flea market at the bottom of the Naschmarkt gives a great view of Otto Wagner's famed Majolica House). A special caution for anyone without a very accurate eye for scale: historic Austrian dollhouse furniture was typically not 1:12, but something along the lines of 1:10 or even 1:8. The larger scale is great if you have Vogue Ginnys looking for housewares, but it won't work in your Greenleaf house.

Visuals

Vienna is visually overwhelming. It and I initially got off on the wrong foot because the husband said it was just like Paris, which is like saying that Chicago is just like New York. Other than being a European capital where there was extensive building in the last half of the 19th century, Vienna is nothing like Paris but is perfectly charming on its own.

There are palaces, of course (not all of which we visited, due to crowds), and the area defined by Spittalberg, Neubau, Mariahilfer, and Karlsplatz is small enough that you can wander it on foot over the course of a couple days. Vienna also has an outstanding mass transit system. Buy the unlimited-ride pass for however many days you intend to stay, so you can get on and off the streetcars at will. This allows you to explore more distant neighborhoods, to get to Schoenbrunn cheaply and comfortably, and to just ride around the Ringstrasse if you want mindless exposure to eye candy. Hint: if you want to explore, hit the suburbs before mid-afternoon. The Viennese use their mass transit, and during peak hours, it's almost impossible to get a seat if you're reasonably young and healthy but have very, very tired feet.

A Museum Must-See is the Imperial Furniture Collection. This museum of furniture discarded by generations of emperors is huge, well-curated, and includes seemingly miles of period rooms. There is an excellent guide -- in English -- sold at the gift counter. Although I am the person whom antique dealers see as Most Likely to Open a Home for Wayward Chairs, I staggered out of the building certain that I had finally seen enough chairs to hold me for a bit. (There are toy shops within a reasonable walk, as well as an excellent Chinese restaurant next door.)

Interesting, but less drop-dead thrilling for the chair enthusiast, is the Museum of Applied Arts. Its highlights are the Thonet chair collection, the modernist architectural models, the Frankfurt kitchen, and the Porcelain Room from a palace in Brno. My beef with this museum is partly that it's relatively small and partly that the curator clearly has an agenda of showing continuity from the earliest Austrian design to the Wiener Werkstatt, whether such continuity exists or not. Visit this museum alone, and you'd never know that the neo-Baroque had been declared the Austrian national style. (Visit the incredible Kunsthistoriches Museum, and you'll have no doubt about this claim.) When you go, think twice about eating at the touristy cafes along the Ring -- about a block up Wollzeile on the left, we found a little place frequented by businesspeople (look for a glass display of pastries) that had pleasant Viennese food at an affordable price.

While the Puppen und Spielzug Museum is mostly devoted to dolls, it contains an entertaining historic dollhouse (scale is about 1:10) surrounded by a roomful of historic roomboxes. This is a very small museum, so don't plan to spend the day.

Naturally, you must have pastries and coffee at a traditional-style Viennese coffee house. My pick is Cafe Mozart, not so much because Harry Lime ordered a lemon soda there in The Third Man as for the pink-and-chocolate decor. If it gets me to like pink, it must be good.

Finally, if you leave the city from the Sudbahnhof rail station, leave some time to visit the nearby Museum of Military History, where the fabulous displays include artisanal dolls dressed in uniforms (and the gift shop sells postcards of same posed against backgrounds -- they are a hoot and I bought far too many). And let's not forget the ship models, particularly the 1:24 battleship.