Then as one gets closer, details start to come alive.

Amazement becomes overwhelming as the onlooker notices the 19th-century dollhouse is not a setting for plastic toys, but is a work of art.

The 9-foot-tall dollhouse, the Coleman House, was made for a wealthy iron master’s children in the 1860s. The house is just one detailed display in the Toy and Miniature Museum in Kansas City, Mo.

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Museum manager Roger Berg said the collection of exhibits in the museum, located on the campus of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, range in size from the Coleman House to paintings on the head of a pin.

We’re not just dolls and dollhouses. People sometimes think there won’t be anything cool to look at, but they’re wrong, he said. We’ve got 20,000 feet of exhibit space, so we tell people to give themselves at least an hour to see all of it. There’re still people who stay and look all day.

But before taking a look at antique toy cars and trains and the work from some of the finest miniaturists in the world, one must know the difference between a toy and a miniature.

According to the museum Website (http://www.umkc.edu/tmm/), a toy is a plaything meant to inspire creative play as well as educate without scale being of any importance.

A miniature’s scale, however, is what makes it a miniature. Miniatures are exact replicas of the real thing and the detail must be accurately reproduced for the era it depicts, according to the Website.

What people remember most is the miniature collection, Berg said. There are things like a violin shop inside of a violin.

There also are vintage rooms depicting scenes from old-time houses, such as a 1-inch-scale reproduction of a parlor room in Philadelphia circa 1765. The attention to detail in this display includes tiny logs in a fireplace and extremely small pens on a desk in the corner that give the rooms a lived-in look.

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After seeing all the detail and design the maze of miniature displays can offer, one can check out one of the temporary exhibits. Berg said the next temporary exhibit will contain a Christmas theme.

The day after Thanksgiving is going to be pretty interesting because that’s when the next exhibit starts. It’s going to be called Past Presents,’ he said. There will be three different decades set up. There’s a 50s Christmas tree, a 60s tree and a 70s tree with toys from those decades set up under it.

The Past Presents display would be the best chance for people to see toys from the decades mentioned because the museum’s toy focus is on the decades before the 50s, Berg said.

The bulk of the toys are from the turn of the century, he said. We don’t have much from less than 50 years ago except for the temporary exhibits.

Berg said sometimes people are not only entertained by what the museum has on display but amazed.

People are surprised by the fact there’s so much here, and you can’t see it all in one visit, he said. We’ve got things for boys and girls, men and women and grandpas and grandmas. They can all relate because they’ve all been kids at one point or anther.

For more information on the Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City, call (816) 333-2055.