Last month, photographer Amy Lombard was en route to meet up with a friend in Berlin when a giant pink mansion caught her eye. “It was like a magnet drawing me in,” she says, “This pink wasteland in the middle of East Berlin.” She quickly detoured and spent the next five hours inside the life-size, 26,900-square-foot “Barbie Dreamhouse,” which opened its enormous palatial pink doors last May. This Berlin location, which is the second life-size Barbie home in existence — following a 10,000-square-foot installation in Sunrise, Florida — drew global attention when hordes of feminists organized an “Occupy Barbie Dreamhouse” and voiced their disapproval when it opened, wielding signs that read “Life in plastic is not fantastic.” They also went topless while burning Barbie on a crucifix.
While no protesters were camped out by the home’s fuchsia stiletto water fountain at the time of Lombard’s visit, she still captured the wonders (horrors?) of the infamous plastic gal’s Malibu estate. Fittingly, the color scheme consisted of pink, white, and purple, except for the rare blue zones that were obviously reserved for Ken. Click through the slideshow for a photographic tour of the home (along with annotations from Lombard), including a kitchen stuffed with giant cupcakes, eerie blonde wigs waiting on stands for visitors to brush, a catwalk, and portraits of Barbie and friends covering the walls. This version of Barbie even owns a pink dolphin that lives in a toilet. The house of curiosities, stuffed with 350 Barbie dolls, will close its doors in Berlin on August 25 — upon which it will get dismantled and go “on tour” around Europe to spread its plastic Malibu sparkle (and enrage feminists) in each new metropolis it decides to temporarily burrow into.
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