Magnificent miniatures

There's a housing boom on James Island, but if you're going to move into a new place built by Donald Geddes, you'd better not be more than 12 inches tall.

A retired Navy submariner, the 91-year-old Geddes annually turns out scores of elaborate and ornate dollhouses. Averaging 4 to 5 feet in height, the multilevel abodes bring smiles to Geddes' many grands and nieces nationwide, and to other children who get their new dollhouses via auctions to benefit charities.

Many Geddes dollhouses are shipped to his daughter, Anne, in Indiana, who arranges the auctions. "My only request is that I want a picture of the young lady who gets it, standing beside it," Geddes said about his works that are auctioned.

The Geddes family scrapbook bulges with photos of Geddes' dollhouses and many beaming recipients. One of Geddes' miniature homes awaits children who have playtime at Hospice of Charleston in Mount Pleasant. The dollhouse is dedicated to Geddes' late wife, Elizabeth, who died in 2008.

It was Elizabeth who put the former New Englander on the dollhouse-building path. "My wife wanted one," he explained.

For Elizabeth, he produced a spectacular doll mansion with a water-producing well and a chimney that discharged smoke. The house, with Donald and Elizabeth Geddes standing beside it, was pictured in the Charleston newspaper in 1974.

Another of Geddes' other grand woodworking projects is a dual-level "condo" -- with staircases -- built for his dogs, Annie and Freckles, and placed in a corner of his living room.

Varied by design, trim and colors, no two Geddes dollhouses are the same. He once made a row of colorful dollhouses emulating Charleston's famous Rainbow Row. Geddes said he used to fully furnish his houses but now lets recipients largely handle the furniture and window dressings.

Geddes recalled that in his youth he worked at a dairy farm in New Hampshire, and that each day he reliably and expeditiously milked the cows and took care of all the feeding and farm maintenance. His life changed dramatically when he was turned down for a raise that he thought was well-deserved.

"They wouldn't give me a $5 raise, and I told them if they wouldn't give me a raise, I'd join the Marines," Geddes said.

He said he went into town, and while the Marine recruiter was not in, a Navy recruiter was. "The first thing I knew, I was in Newport, R.I., as a budding sailor."

Although he prefers the great outdoors, somehow, he said, he ended up doing 20 years beneath the seas. He chose to live on James Island due to fond memories of Navy assignments in the Lowcountry, including a Charleston degaussing station.

Trained as an electrician by the Navy, Geddes said he never had formal schooling in woodwork or construction, but the craft comes naturally to him.

"I had to have something to do" after retirement, he said, "and I've made stuff with wood all my time."

He budgets $200 a month to pay for building supplies and cover shipment costs for his finished houses.

He still prefers the outdoors, and his open-air, backyard shop includes tools, paint, dollhouses in various states of completion, plywood stacks, boxes and containers of dollhouse-building supplies. Geddes said he works outside even when it's hot, but the cold will drive him inside.

"When it's 50 degrees and the wind blowing, I'm gone," he said.

Woodworking is good therapy, Geddes said. "Some days, I come out here aching. But I come out here and start working with the wood, and pretty soon I feel good."

The most time-consuming part of dollhouse building is the trim, but it's part of what makes Geddes' projects special. Putting individual cedar "tiles" on the home's roofs is tedious, but once the roofing is in place and shellacked, it "will stand out like a sore toe at a barn dance," Geddes said with a smile.

Reach Edward C. Fennell at efennell@postandcourier.com or 937-5560.