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Hello to everybody After some months of silence, this is my new miniature creation. A new shop windows with a showroom of bathrooms and accessories. As always the façade follows the art-nouveau style, with an important sgraffito in two colours, stone arches and a sinuous baseboard also made of stone. the sidewall is made with a new piece of concrete. It reproduces the original design which Antonio Gaudí made for the first time in Batlló House. This house is in Barcelona, in Passeig de Gràcia (one of the most important Barcelona's avenue), and this design was also used for the pavement of this avenue, but made of green-grey concrete (those in Batlló house were of enameled ceramic).

I have always admired miniaturists who build wonderful staircases in roomboxes and their dollhouses. I remember Paul Moore had (from memory) created the Winterthur Staircase and it was shown on the inside cover of the back of a Miniature Collector Magazine. In my recent quest of stairbuilding and I had a nice conversation with Peter Kendall at Guild School and he recommended a book, A Treatise on Stairbuilding & Handrailing by W&A Mowat. (Excellent Book.) I also purchased, Constructing Staircases, Balustrades & Landings by William P. Spence and Taunton's Building Stairs from the Editors of Fine Homebuilding. It is interesting that the cover of the book, Constructing Staircases, Balustrades & Landings has a Houseworks curved staircase on the cover. When I looked at the book initially, I was wondering if we were going to discuss miniature staircases. I think I have all my questions answered, now to just apply the knowledge. In Taunton's book, the chapter of Making a Curved Handrail fascinates me. There is store bought bending rail to enable the curved handrail for real life applications, and at the end of the chapter, when I asked about the compound routering for the curved handrail, (see Bill Robertson's Forum on the staircase in Twin Manors) the curved part of the handrail that sets above the Newell post at the bottom of the stairs is called a volute. It is going to be fun to try and make one of these someday. Tamra/Indiana

Hello This time I want to show you some bathrooms which I have made for different miniature houses. As you know I build houses with an aesthetic of the beginning of XX century but with a contemporary feeling, this is the reason because of I use accesories and lights that, in some case, have been designed one hundred years after. So, in these bathrooms I try to reproduce the atmosphere of these rooms, I keep the ancient cast iron bathtube and the bath sink, which in many cases was made in England, as I can do in a real restoration of a flat. But the toilet and the bidet are new ones. The toilet because the original ones have high cistern and this is quite inconvenient, and also because this piece was usually separated, so you have to put a new one in the bathroom. The bidet, because was not very common. So toilet and bidet are from the same collection while bathtube and sink are the original ones. I also keep the same tiles, quite worn and no so shining, and up to a hight of 1,60 m, and I paint the rest of the wall. Although, as you can see in one of the toilets, all the wall is painted but has a varnish protection of 1,60 m also. lights, as usually, are modern. And floors, as described in one of my topics.