Oh, little town

Young Chang

When Marilyn Tyler couldn’t find anything resembling Norbert the

dragon in her garage of miniature collectibles, she scoured the malls for

dragon figurines that would bear the Harry Potter character’s likeness.

She found a creature at Medieval Pines at the Irvine Spectrum. It was

too big. She went to Franklin Mint at South Coast Plaza. Theirs was just

right.

The 70-year-old created an entire British village -- with features

including Privet Drive and the wizarding school of Hogwart’s -- with this

sort of exact care.

Almost 70 lightable buildings and an indeterminate number of

accessories, a miniature of Harry Potter and his redhead friend Ron

Weasley included, make up her room-sized town. A dreary, almost spooky

London gray in the mood of J.K. Rowling’s four books and the movie “Harry

Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” coats the display.

She cleared the desk, chair, couch and filing cabinet from her home

office before moving the Harry Potter world in.

“It just seemed like a fun thing to do,” the Costa Mesa resident said.

“I did it before the movie came out. I was pleased because my imagination

was pretty close to what they showed in the movie.”

Her granddaughter Marlene read all four Harry Potter titles and

insisted that Tyler needed to get in on the Potter fantasies.

“She gave me one and said, ‘Grandma, I want you to read this and then

we’ll discuss it,”’ Tyler said.

Tyler, who has been collecting figures from the collectible/giftware

industry Department 56 for six years, read the series and decided to add

a Harry Potter world to her other miniature holiday worlds (she has seven

total).

The Little Town of Bethlehem lights up her living room. The display

includes Harod’s Palace, a desert setting, the Star of Bethlehem, an

oasis, an entry gate in and out of the city and palm trees.

An exhibit called Season’s Bay lines the windowed wall of her dining

room. Similar to the scene in “Notting Hill” where the seasons change

behind Hugh Grant as he walks through London, the display runs through

winter, fall, spring and summer.

Crew teams row in a river during summer. Each boat represents either

Tyler’s son-in-law, granddaughter or grandson, each of whom compete in

crew.

A collection titled “Storybook” stretches across the living room.

There are scenes from various nursery rhymes and stories, including a

recent addition from “The Wizard of Oz.”

The miniatures didn’t come with a yellow brick road, so Tyler built

one herself.

She also played a creative hand in assembling the Harry Potter

collection, which took six weeks to put together. The company she

collects from hasn’t made any figures for the story yet. Tyler mixed and

matched buildings and accessories from her Charles Dickens and Christmas

in the City collections to make up a fantasy town for child-wizard Harry

Potter.

The Dickens display happened to come with a building called Dursley’s

Manor, which coincidentally bears the namesake of Harry’s aunt and uncle

-- the Dursleys. He lived with them before going to Hogwart’s school for

wizards.

To portray London, Tyler used Parliament and Big Ben pieces, two-tier

buses and Londoners cloaked in heavy winter clothes.She included a green

field to symbolize the sport ofQuidditch.

She used an old-school train station to mimic the station from which

Harry left on platform 9 3/4 to travel to Hogwart’s and stuck a large

willowing tree in the ground to represent Hogwart’s Whomping Willow.

She built, out of Styrofoam and spray paint, hills to lead up to the

school.

She bought gravel to sprinkle on the floor and built a river out of

hardened resin.

“It’s creativity,” Tyler said to explain why she makes villages. “It

gives you imagination and my grandchildren adore it.”

Stephen De Lacy, a long-time neighbor to Tyler who works with special

effects, hooked up some of the mobiles and took care of lighting and

other electrical configurations for parts of the village.

“I saw the movie recently and she hit a lot of the same points so I

think Harry Potter fans would appreciate it,” De Lacy said. “It’s very

detailed.”

Husband Vernon Tyler, a 78-year-old retired pump engineer, also helped

with the technical side of setting up Potter’s world.

“And our granddaughter Marlene -- she acted as grandma’s advisory,” he

said.