Colmar in late December felt almost aggressively charming. It was 30 December, just before New Year, and the town seemed to have settled on a single decorative theme: toys. Plush bears looked out from shop windows, cafés, and private apartments. Bears everywhere — soft, identical, endlessly repeated. Against that backdrop, the Toy Museum in Colmar felt like an obvious next stop. I expected something equally sweet and nostalgic.
A Small Museum With Clear Priorities
A miniature street that feels quietly inhabited — houses, windows, a parked car, and no visible child in sight.
The Toy Museum in Colmar is small — compact enough that you grasp its scale almost immediately. I spent about half an hour there, not because I rushed, but because the space reveals itself quickly. The collection focuses largely on toys from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On paper, it sounds familiar. In practice, the emphasis is unexpected.
If you come expecting rows of dolls, prams, and porcelain faces, you’ll be surprised. There are dolls, but not many — perhaps a couple of dozen in total. They appear briefly, almost discreetly, more like witnesses than protagonists. The museum’s real focus lies elsewhere.
Not Dolls, but Movement
Toys here don’t invent fantasy — they shrink the adult world down to scale.
Here, the dominant presence is movement: model railways with wagons endlessly circling their tracks, collections of toy trains, miniature streets, small cars, mechanical details that invite slow looking rather than instant delight. These are not toys meant to be hugged. They are toys meant to be watched. Repetition. Routes. You stand there longer than you expect, following tiny journeys that never quite end.
The first floor is more openly interactive, designed for children, and noticeably louder. I didn’t linger there. What held my attention were the exhibits that felt less like entertainment and more like diagrams — small, ordered worlds built to function smoothly. The museum is modest in size, but precise in what it chooses to show.
How Adults Once Imagined Childhood
One of the few dolls in the collection — more an object of observation than nostalgia.
That choice matters. This is not a museum about childhood fantasy so much as a museum about how adults once imagined childhood. The scarcity of dolls and the prominence of trains, streets, and machines subtly shift the narrative. These toys rehearse roles: movement, control, systems, schedules. Play here begins to look suspiciously like preparation.
Seen against the backdrop of Colmar itself — a town that, at that moment, resembled a festive display case — the contrast sharpens. Outside, everything leans toward softness and visual comfort. Inside the museum, the tone is calmer, almost sober. Less “look how sweet this is,” and more “this is how play was structured.”
A Different Kind of Pause
This stayed with me. Especially later, when I remembered a moment in Basel, passing a shop window advertising a toy museum that looked unapologetically cute — exactly as one might expect. I never went in. Perhaps because, by then, the Colmar museum had already done something more interesting: it disrupted expectation without drawing attention to the disruption itself.
Leaving the museum, I stepped back into the bear-filled streets. The transition was almost comic. Yet the museum lingered as a pause — not a highlight, not a must-see, but a small corrective. A reminder that toys are not only about delight or nostalgia. They are also about order, repetition, and the adult ideas quietly embedded in play.
It wasn’t a place I felt the urge to return to. But it was a place that made the rest of Colmar look slightly different — and that, in the end, felt like enough.
Another stop on this trip approached childhood from a very different angle — the Tomi Ungerer Museum in Strasbourg.
