Austin collector creates dream house for 600+ Barbie dolls

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AUSTIN (KXAN) — Life in plastic really is fantastic for the vast collection of Barbie dolls that one woman keeps artfully displayed throughout her north Austin home.

Diana Harris spent the past 25 years amassing more than 600 dolls, so her love of Barbie precedes the buzz whipped up recently over the movie about the iconic Mattel toy coming out Friday. However, she's incredibly excited by all the hype, just like so many others in Central Texas are. She already bought a ticket to see the new film and even added the latest Barbie and Ken dolls to her collection that sport some of the outfits worn in the movie by actors Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

"It's definitely Barbie week, so I'm excited to see the movie and see which direction it goes," Harris said. "I just say that I hope that the movie is respectful to the legacy of Barbie."

As a young girl, Harris had a few dolls and then passed them onto her sister after she felt she "grew out" of playing with them. Shortly after finishing college, though, she bought a few dolls once she "had a little disposable income" and dove into the world of collecting. Now, in her primary bedroom, a shelf displays a line of pink boxes containing the same Barbie dolls that she once had as a child.

"It just kind of started one day, and I just kept seeing more and more dolls that I liked," Harris explained. "I'm choosy. I mean, I know 600 doesn't sound choosy, but I have to be choosy."

Down the hall from her main bedroom, she converted another space into what can only be described as the Barbie room. Shelves built from floor to ceiling wrap around the walls, which are painted in signature Barbie pink, of course. The shelves are carefully lined with beautifully-dressed dolls, and almost all of them are still in their original boxes. Four glass display cases filled with Barbies also sit in the middle of the room. Walking around the space is both overwhelming and nostalgic because Harris has dolls dating back decades, showing how Barbie evolved over all these years not only in her style but her many, many careers, too. Harris pointed out Mattel made a Barbie this year who works as an interior designer and another that's a beekeeper.

"It's nice to surround yourself with things that you love, and she is just someone that has always evoked happiness and, for young girls, a future that they can project onto the doll, like what they want to be," Harris said. "That's what I always liked about it is that it was there, and I remember personally pretending to be these different role models and professions using the doll."

However, Harris said she mainly focuses on the Barbie fashion, as she considers which dolls to add to her large collection. While visiting her house Tuesday afternoon, she highlighted some of her favorite Barbies made from partnerships with well-known fashion brands like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta and Diane von Furstenberg. She even has a Barbie made to look like Rihanna when she wore a dramatic, yellow Guo Pei gown to The Met Gala in 2015.

"I strive to collect all the dolls that are fashion designer collaborations or department store collaborations, stuff like that," she said, "so I just enjoy that sector of the Barbie-collecting world."

'Barbie' red carpet looks

Harris has enjoyed seeing that some of the dolls in her collection match what Margot Robbie has worn on recent red carpets to promote the "Barbie" movie. This sparked a social media trend of people sharing side-by-side photos of the actress next to the doll that inspired the look. At one event, Robbie had on a black-and-white striped dress that reinterpreted the swimsuit worn by one of the original Barbies. Harris has that familiar blonde doll from 1960 displayed in a glass case in her living room alongside some other Mattel toys from that era.

"It's been really exciting to see the twists that they put on the original fashion and how they've modernized it or made it applicable, you know, to a real person," she said.

While she has no plans to stop collecting Barbies anytime soon, Harris hopes the movie will welcome in a new generation of people who'd like to start up the same hobby that brought her so much joy for the past two decades. She stressed, though, the importance of keeping her collectibles neat and tidy — and almost always in their boxes.

"We definitely, in our family, believe in showcasing the collections. We don't have storage units," Harris said. "We don't want to ever get to the point where we have to put stuff in storage. We want to be able to have it around us and enjoy it."