Windon-on-Water Village, Rural community

So I'm having a go at this creator challenge, because I like to think I can call myself a creator, and lately I feel in need of a challenge!

This lot is MAXIS CONTENT ONLY. No CC at all, nothing, not even a little bit.

About building:

I wanted to showcase some of the things you can do with the in-game stuff, some nifty build cheats and a bit of imagination, as well as testing myself and learning/developing new techniques along the way. This upload represents about 16 hours of work!

I've used:
Spiral stairs, you'll see 2 slightly different ones in here.
Arched roof
Domed roof (2 types)
Split level
Arched bridges (2 types)
Latticed garden pagoda
Offset object placement
moveobjects

About the lot

This village is an English rural village, based very loosely on several in the Cotswolds and Dorset where I have lived.

A river runs through the village, and can be crossed by 2 bridges.
You can roughly split the village into 4 sections, do take a good look through the screenshots, it's very hard to sum this up in a few good shots, because it is quite sprawled, but I hope I have given a flavour of it:

The marketplace and green
The market consists of a produce stall, a jewelery stall and a coffee stall. There is seating for sims to drink coffee outside when the weather is good (or not, sim's seem to have no common sense with these things)
There is a war memorial in the market square, quite usual for English towns and villages, of course the game has no poppy wreaths so I made do with festive holiday wreaths! Mildly innapropriate but you can't tell to look at it.

The green is an open grassy area ideal for ball games and snowball fights, there is a small children's play area, and a bus shelter, for waiting for taxis and cuddling in!




The Church
Every village has a church, by definition. This is a very typical old English church. You'll notice it doesn't have a spire, that's quite usual, in fact older rural churches that have spires have usually had them added as a fashionable afterthought.
In the church there is an area for a wedding ceremony, a WC, an upstairs office, and a downstairs crypt. The church also has a large churchyard, with plenty of space for your dead sims. I have made sure there are good flat patches in the landscaping to accomodate these, and a few gravestones will make the church look really authentic. You'll notice 3 sarcophagi in the churchyard and crypt, these are decorated foundations, not objects-negating the need for a custom object. In the crypt there is also a shrine with candles, these are from the holiday pack, so will only appear if you have that.



The shops
Windon-on-Water comes complete with a set of basic shops like any village. There is a newsagent, a clothing boutique and a grocers. The shops are in a terraced row and each has it's own unique back-yard. The grocers also has an upstairs with an office, a bathroom and a kitchen. The boutique has mannequins from H&M set, these won't be there if you don't have the pack.
There is also a small Post Office across the street from the shops, I put this in there because a village isn't right without one, it has a serving area and a back office, sims can buy magazines there, so it isn't purely decorative. Outside the shops there is a 'phone box, not quite as authentic looking as I would like, but not bad for no CC, and it works.


The Pub and Tea rooms.

The Bull Inn is a Tudor style timber build building. The main bar is downstairs and there is a games room upstairs. Outside there is a riverside beer garden, ideal for barbeques.
The Poached Pear Tearoom and Restaurant isn't a tearoom at all, sims don't drink proper English tea, poor fools, only coffee - so uncilvilised, so the downstairs is actually a coffee room, not a tea room. On a lower, split level are the public washrooms. Up a spiral staircase you will find a quaint little restaurant, that overlooks the public gardens,
The public gardens are a lovely place for your sims to relax, elder sims particularly like to look at well tended flowerbeds. They can also play chess in the pagoda.



The last bits of blurb
This is a CC free lot
It is a 5x6 lot, the biggest one.
It reqs all EPS to BV, it may require FFS, the more I research the necessity of this pack the more confused I get, but I think the concensus is that if you have later EPs you don't need it? May depend on the weather, or the angle of the moon relative to mars, as this game often seems to!
This lot has been tested with 2 different families, in autumn and spring, for one day each. I have had a successful wedding, and all shops work.
This is a large lot, so please be aware of that if you have graphics/lag issues. If you like this but know your PC can only handle small lots, keep an eye out, because I will be doing some lots in my Little Lots series based on (but a bit different to) the sections of this lot (in fact I have already done a pub).
This is not a lot for owning, no really! Apart from the fact that it is so spread out, and has so many cashiers and you would never make any money, the gardening would be literally impossible (due to moveobject placed plants) and it would spoil. It is however, lovely for storytelling, or mooching about in, doing a spot of fishing, having some lunch, buy a magazine, read it in the beer garden.....

Additional Credits:
The build tutorials on MTS2, I've read them all, and although I never follow them directly, they have given me the tools and inspiration to work with the techniques that make builds like this work.
This website, that helped remind me what the outside world is like when I ran out of ideas http://www.imagesofdorset.org.uk/picindex.htm