a miniature house

[miniarquitect]

hello to everybody,

this new topic is going to be very extensive, so I will need four messages due to the limit of 1 Mb  when I adjoint photos. I hope it won't be heavy nor boring!

I want to talk about what I call "miniature houses" or "miniature architecture" in order to distinguish from "dollhouses".

a "miniature house" is the same of any other miniature, that is, if you enlarge twelve times, you could walk and live as if it was real. (well, it is not absolutely true, there is not running water nor gas, only electricity: miniature switches and miniature sockets in each room that could work in a real scale).

So it means that there is a logical layout of rooms, stairs, distributors or corridors, that I have four façades (in a town house, two of them are party walls made of brick with small ventilation courtyards for secondary rooms such as batrooms, stairs, ..), that rooms have the appropiate size to their use, that the structure from groundfloor to the top is logical.

As some façades must be practicables to see the inside, I divide them in those points that match with a architectural joint or  with a construction material change, and never with a hinge that can be seen from outside.

The geometry of the house is studied carefully because all rooms, windows, doors, floors.. can be taken apart and also because when it is lighted, light must be seen from windows, never from joints!. As nothing is glued but inserted, I must accept some little mistakes, this is quite obvious!, although I try that this mistakes will be also on scale!

As well as you make a cupboard, or a chest of drawers, and you show them in detail as if they were a purpose in themselves, always empty, when they were designed to keep clothes and other private items, I also show my houses empty. Each one is free to imagine how can decorate its inside or even change the color or the pavement, as we do when we want to buy a real house!.

As an example of this, I invite you to a virtual visit through one of this houses. It is a small town house in two floors, no more than one hundred square meters in total. The reason is quite simple, as well as in real scale we can find small building sites, in my case this building site was my car!  because this house was shown in London and it could not be bigger!

1. the entrance, with a mahogany double door and a glassed door that gives you to the entrance hall

2. the entrance hall, a distributor and the kitchen, at the back

3. the sitting room seen from the entrance hall

4. the sitting room

5. the distributor, the first door on your left goes to the kitchen, the second, to the dining room. In front of you, the

stairs

6. the kitchen

[miniarquitect]

7. the kitchen seen from the window, you can see the entrance at the end

8. the dining room. a "biluna" lamp (from Prandina) hangs from ceiling

9. the dining room, through the balcony we can go out to the inner courtyard and make the photo through the kitchen's window!!

10. we start going up. plaster lamps from atelier Sedap

11. arriving to the first floor. the first door drives you to a room

12. a bedroom, above the dining room.

 

[miniarquitect]

13. the distributor of the first floor. You can see the stairs that drives you to the roof, the bedroom's door and ,on the left, the bathroom door. This distributor has an inserted cupboard

14. the bathroom

15. inside the bathtub, we can see the WC, the basin and the distributor and another room

16. from the distributor, we go in this room that drives to the main bedroom

17. the main bedroom, which is above the sitting room

 

[miniarquitect]

18. again on the stairs, going up to the roof

19. the stairwell when we are on the top

20. finally, the opened house from left side

21. from the wright side

22. and the house in the Kensington Dollshouse Festival

 

[ElgaKoster]

Your work leaves me almost speechless, one can't tell from the photos that it is a model. This is the kind of house I dream of building and I hope I will achieve it with my Cape Dutch house. I guess this is one of the reasons I abandoned the first house I started many years ago when I was new to the hobby, it just never felt like a real house.

Your house fills me with inspiration, thank you for sharing all the photos showing all the detail.

[Guy Gadois]

You must have 1/12 scale carpenters working for you! This seems impossible for a full scale human to do this.

 

This quality work both inspires me to strive for equal results and it also makes me want to burn all the miniatures I have made!! Semi joking.

 

Really fine craftsmanship!

 

Cheers, Guy

[MissyBoling]

Wow, true inspiration!

[miniarquitect]

Your work leaves me almost speechless, one can't tell from the photos that it is a model. This is the kind of house I dream of building and I hope I will achieve it with my Cape Dutch house. I guess this is one of the reasons I abandoned the first house I started many years ago when I was new to the hobby, it just never felt like a real house.

Your house fills me with inspiration, thank you for sharing all the photos showing all the detail.

 

Hello Elga

thank you for your comments, although due to the quality of your work, I don't have any doubt about your success in building your Cape Dutch house.

If you let me, I can tell you some advices that can be useful.

in the same way that when you are doing  some parts of a furniture, you have the whole piece in your mind, try to imagine the whole space of the house and think that a room is not something independant but something linked to other parts.

In this house I'm showing to you, the depth in real scale could perfectly be twice. It could mean huge party walls, so my house could look like a wagon rather than a house. And although this could be real, in miniature it would be neither practical nor aesthetic. So, it is important to focus on those characteristics that identify the building, in my case I know that heigh and depth are more important than width, so the miniature house must be high and deep without exaggeration.

As you can open some façades to see the inside, I try to put balconies and windows in those fixed façades. So, the rooms are something else that three lonely walls, and the presence of a door and window/balcony is more realistic. Besides, if I align the window with door, I can increase the perspective feeling because through the window I can see more than one room.

In this house, ceiling heigh is about 3 m. It's ok, but it is not very rare to find room heigh of 4,5 m. or even more. But more heigh means larger stairs, and if the house is not very large, at the end the main room are the stairs!!.

In my opinion, it is more real and interesting that you try to make a clever interpretation of an existing building rather than try to make an exact copy.

finally, English is not my language, so sorry for all mistakes and I wish you can understand my ideas!

 

[miniarquitect]

You must have 1/12 scale carpenters working for you! This seems impossible for a full scale human to do this.

 

This quality work both inspires me to strive for equal results and it also makes me want to burn all the miniatures I have made!! Semi joking.

 

Really fine craftsmanship!

 

Cheers, Guy

 

 

Hello Guy,

Yes!! of course I use miniature workers! Although I don't recommend you, their wage and labour claims are 1/1 scale!!!

before you decide to burn your miniatures, please send your mozarabic bell tower to me!!!.

thank you for your visit

 

[miniarquitect]

Wow, true inspiration!

 

thank you so much, you are wery kind!

[ElgaKoster]

Thank you Francisco for telling me more, your English is just fine, I am actually Afrikaans (originated mainly from Dutch) speaking and I know I make mistakes with English too.

I am going to post a photo of the floor floor plan of my Cape Dutch home, I am planning for it to have glimpses into other rooms too, but it will be a big house as I plan on furnishing it and there was nothing small about most of the Cape dutch furniture.

[Victoria]

Hello, Francisco! I just love this house, you did a fantastic job with planning. It looks quite small on the table, but the photos of the interior make it look very realistic!

I'd love to see more of your creations here!

One question from me - do you use some CAD software or is it old style planning with pencil and paper?

[miniarquitect]

Hello, Francisco! I just love this house, you did a fantastic job with planning. It looks quite small on the table, but the photos of the interior make it look very realistic!

I'd love to see more of your creations here!

One question from me - do you use some CAD software or is it old style planning with pencil and paper?

 

Hello Victoria,

it is very small 50x80 cms and 85 heigh. And rooms are about 10 square meters, according to the standards (obviously the minimun), but if it was real it could be approved by the building's inspeccion

You are right, I design the houses, to the last detail, in my PC with a CAD program. In 3D, in that way I check if I can open the façades or not, if I can get out or not the rooms from the main structure.

The building process is, up to a point, a way of checking that the design is ok!

I also use these drawings as a jigs in some parts

thank you Victoria for your interest!

[miniarquitect]

I enclose one of these drawings

[mizpat]

Absolutely amazing work!  The realism is incredible.  Thanks so much for posting this!

[Victoria]

Wow, I didn't realize it was so small. Btw, what is your favorite cad for house planning? I've been working with Sketchup for quite a long time, but moved to solidworks and rhino for furniture modeling, and now thinking of cad software for houses.

[miniarquitect]

Absolutely amazing work!  The realism is incredible.  Thanks so much for posting this!

 

Thanks to you for your comments and visit!

[miniarquitect]

Wow, I didn't realize it was so small. Btw, what is your favorite cad for house planning? I've been working with Sketchup for quite a long time, but moved to solidworks and rhino for furniture modeling, and now thinking of cad software for houses.

 

a CAD software is ok. I draw pieces of wood, sheets and strips, which don't have a complex volum because they are parallelepipeds, and I think that is easier than with Rhino. Sketchup is ok if you want a realistic idea  of something, but is an empty volume and I'm working with solid wood, so I don't use it.