Welcome to the doll’s house.

That’s what I thought of entering the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s design studio at the start of a behind-the-scenes tour of the installation of American Made, which opens Saturday.

American Made: 250 Years of American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston covers a dizzying array of over 200 objects across artistic media and drawn from the MFAH as well as the Bayou Bend Collections and Rienzi. With featured appearances of iconic figures from Audubon and O’Keeffe to Newman and Diebenkorn, the challenge of America Made for viewers will be taking it all in.

Lots of history, limited space

The challenge for installation, of course, is making it all fit.

The MFAH design studio is home to Bill Cochrane and his doll houses. Of course he referred to them more properly as architectural models, built to scale, of the MFAH galleries. Perfect tiny maquettes, or mock-ups made to scale, of works of art to be installed adorn the walls of the little structure. Like the best deck of cards ever designed, a pile of little renderings yet to be place were ready to be shifted around at will.

All the model lacked were tiny patrons peering in and wondering what to make of the art.

It’s no easy task to squeeze 250 years of art into some 200 or so objects. Hence, Cochrane told me, the need for planning is paramount, “If you don’t have a good plan, the result it chaos.”

The physical planning begins at least half a year out. “About six months ago,” Cochrane said, “[curators] Emily [Neff] and Christine [Gervais] came down with checklists and we started making the maquettes. About eight weeks out we had it firmed up. With a museum our size, because we have so many exhibitions in so few spaces, you never have much flexibility.”

Any show is a journey, but selecting from your own collection seems to produce kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome. “The biggest challenge,” Cochrane said, “is that there are so many objects, just getting them to fit. I think the original checklist was 400 objects. Then you try to get them in the space. We want to be sure people aren’t bumping into objects or that there’s so much to see that they can’t take anything in.”

Designing the show involves wall colors, wall placement, furniture, and even slight micro-adjustments to height or placement. In other words, the work doesn’t stop until the doors open to the public. “We’re usually there until the end,” Cochrane said, “because you have lighting to take care of and if a case doesn’t work we replace it. Then there are the graphics and the labels.”

Still, Cochrane had a little time to sort through the maquettes a pick out a favorite. “What’s fun about this show,” he said, “is that we’re bringing out things that have never or not recently been shown. Take this Tiffany chandelier.” Cochrane pointed to a tiny rendering. “I’ve been here 13-14 years and I think it was last shown 20 years ago,” he said.

A craft full of Texas history

To reach the exhibition, we wandered through a furniture shop redolent with sawdust and past a wall studded with cubical plexiglass cases from previous exhibits, which the MFAH religiously reuses. “You’d be shocked,” Cochrane said. “A plexiglass cover can cost us $1500 or more.”

The real action, at this point, was in the galleries, where most of the furniture had already been hefted and a rare quilt waited to be lifted into place on a blank wall.

The “Baltimore Album” Quilt dates from the 1840s and came to the MFAH by way of the Rockefellers. Curator Christine Gervais explained its history. “The quilt was given to us in the 1940s by Mrs. Rockefeller,” she said. “She had bought it from the Folk Art Collection of Elie Nadelman. He was a well-known folk art collector before people were really collecting folk art.”

You can see Nadelman’s marvelous Tango, one of Gary Tinterow’s favorite works, in the show.

“This quilt,” Gervais continued, “is called 'Baltimore Album' Quilt because it has a progression of images like a photo album. Because of the iconography — a lone star, which you’ll see — and because there’s been speculation that it was made to commemorate Texas statehood, she wanted it to go to a Texas institution. So it came to us.”

As the installers slowly began to shed the rolled quilt’s plastic wrapping, with a great tearing of tape, anticipation grew and my impromptu art history lesson took a brief break.

“I’ve actually never seen it unfurled,” Gervais admitted. “It’s a bit of a task to undo it and look at it, so I’ve only seen it in images.”

“Let’s unfurl!” Neff exclaimed. “How patriotic for the Fourth of July.”

It would be a cliché to say that we all gasped when the quilt finally unfurled down the wall. It would also be true.

The beige, green-bordered quilt features pairs of images distributed across its squares like cards in a memory game. Pairs of blue eagles, floral arrangements, lyres, watermelons, and other objects abound, but an appropriately singular lone red star makes its nod to Texas.

And what, you might wonder, affixes an 1840s quilt to the wall? Velcro. Sometimes it’s as simple as that even though planning an exhibition is anything but.

A rare look at hidden treasures

Neff highlighted the singularity of American Made. “Because we’re departmentalized and Bayou Bend and Rienzi are separate,” she said, “this was our big chance to bring things together that are rarely together because of lighting or whatever other reasons.” Gervais felt similarly, emphasizing the desire “to show the rare, the special, and the unique.”

Neff illustrated just what they meant when she lead me to a 1745 Joseph Badger portrait of 3-year-old John Gerry. Next to it was a figure covered in muslin.

Neff said, “He’s 3 years old and dressed as a young gentleman of the day. What’s great about this with its original frame is that it survives with its original costume, which is right here. You can count of one hand the number of costumes that survive with a painting. This was our opportunity to show something rather extraordinary.”

As she spoke she unveiled the coat from the picture in front of me. “It was so tiny,” Gervais noted, “that we didn’t have a mannequin that would fit it, so one of our production team hand-carved one in the shape and size of a three-year-old body.”

Wandering through half-installed galleries, it was hard not to linger over every unpacked item. But one piece stopped me in my tracks — with its horns.

Wenzel Friedrich was a San Antonio-based European and a well-known designer specializing in chairs made out of longhorn steers. Luckily for the MFAH guards, the Rocking Chair’s curved black horns and jaguar hide fascinate but don’t exactly invite you to test it out.

“It’s so Vivienne Westwood!” I said. “She wishes,” Neff shot back.

No behind the scenes tour of an installation would be complete without an actual installer, so I caught a quick chat with Michael Kennaugh. With several rooms still half in boxes, Kennaugh looked harried but also excited.

“3D always takes the longest,” Kennaugh said when I asked about the hardest part of the job. “And with furniture you only have one chance to get it on the deck correctly. You can’t be shoving this stuff around,” he said, pointing to an intricate but massive cabinet.

An 18-year veteran of the MFAH, Kennaugh has seen, as he puts it, “a whole lot. It’s an unfolding empire.”

Doll houses and all.