Plenty of local children down through the years have been enchanted by the Lyman Allyn Art Museum's signature doll house.

Its mammoth size - about 9 feet tall, 15 feet long and 3 feet deep - impresses, as visitors can peek inside three stories of rooms, into kitchens and bedrooms and a dining room and a nursery. They are all populated with delicate dolls and intricate decorations. Here is a tiny bar of soap, there is a wee set of dominoes.

"Literally, the closer you look, the more you see," says Lyman Allyn Director D. Samuel Quigley.

Harold Hawthorne created the Victorian doll house in 1962 specifically for the Lyman Allyn, with the idea that it would serve as home for the museum's toy collection donated by Lydia Sachs Baratz.

It was installed on the museum's lower level, at the bottom of the staircase.

The house ended up moving over the years, though - to downtown New London when the Lyman Allyn had a space at Harris Place; to the Deshon-Allyn House on the museum grounds; and, most recently, to the Glassenberg Gallery inside the museum.

Now, it's back home. The museum has reinstalled it at its original location.

As Lyman Allyn Registrar and Assistant Curator Jane LeGrow notes, it's a better site for viewing; small kids can't see into the third-floor windows when they're standing on the same floor at the house. But as they descend the stairs, the children are high enough that they can see everything.

In conjunction with the doll house's return to its original locale, Lyman Allyn officials are planning on turning that lower level into a family-focused site.

They hope to create activities aimed at kids ages 3 to 10. It will be interactive play with toys and games, books and dolls, culled from a variety of eras and cultures.

LeGrow says it will include "old-school, tactile and sensory imaginative play - the kinds of things you don't get from a screen."

Exactly when this will happen is up in the air; it's pending funding, awaiting word on grant applications.

But the ideas are energetically percolating.

"We hope to transform the whole lower level into a neighborhood of other doll houses and an interactive, creative play area," Quigley says.

Youngsters might rearrange the interior of a doll house that's illustrated on a magnet board, for instance, or play with a tea set.

Part of the plan is to establish a multicultural neighborhood around the Hawthorne doll house, with interpretive materials in both Spanish and English.

"Right now, the Hawthorne is a pure Victorian doll house. The idea of creating a neighborhood down there is about trying to give a little more diversity to the situation," Quigley says.

He says he wants to animate that lower level as a place where families can go after they've seen other exhibitions - and maybe they can create the kind of fond memories that generations have previously enjoyed of the Hawthorne doll house.

Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. (closed today) and 1-5 p.m. Sun., Williams St., New London; $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, students over 18, and military personnel, $5 for students under 18, free for kids under 12 and for New London residents; 443-2545.