Visitors to Gabriella Turner’s house are offered a seat in the garage.
There isn’t space to comfortably sit anywhere else, as the Katoomba woman’s house is bursting at the seams with almost 1000 dolls.
The dolls stand to attention on the stairs, drawing visitors up to a choc-a-bloc lounge room and three bedrooms.
Every day, Ms Turner and her partner Bob Morris will pay a visit to all the secondhand shops in the Upper Mountains, in search of more dolls.
“All the [staff in the] secondhand shops know me,” Ms Turner said.
“I can’t go past an op shop without looking for dolls.
“Bob would say ‘oh no, not another doll’. But I always find space for another one.”
Ms Turner’s fascination with dolls began as a child, when her mum would give her dolls as gifts for birthdays, Christmas, and just for the fun of it.
“Mum always bought me a doll every month,” she said.
“Mum would make me dollhouses out of matchsticks and furnish it out.”
She still has two of her childhood dolls, given at the age of eight, but didn’t start collecting them until she was an adult. She began seriously collecting 10 years ago.
“I’d take $10 into a secondhand shop and buy a doll for a dollar. If it was broke I would fix it and I’d save my pennies for the reborns,” Ms Turner, aged 65, said.
The reborn dolls are often made of silicone, and are the most life-like of them all, and off the shelf they can retail for hundreds of dollars.
“They are my favourites ‘cause they are like real babies,” Ms Turner said.
“If I was rich I would have this place full of silicone dolls.”
She has seven children and 21 grandchildren, who like to give her dolls as gifts, just as her mother did.
Her daughter Samantha McCabe seems to have derived some of her mum’s passion for dolls, but she likes to collect freaky dolls. She’ll inherit her mum’s collection when the time comes.
Ms Turner hopes there might be other doll enthusiasts in the Blue Mountains interested in meeting up to swap stories and share their passion.
She has everything from Christine, Betty, Kewpie, Reborn, and OK Kader dolls.
It’s a time-consuming hobby gently cleaning the dust off the hundreds of dolls as it gathers, and fixing up each new purchase, washing the clothes and ironing them.
She recently bought a doll’s house, and is looking forward to gradually decking it out in Victorian furniture.
“I will go to the day I die, I will collect dolls. There’s always room for another doll,” Ms Turner said.
“This is my life my dolls.”