Backdoor Lane 22 [NL+OfB] -- Courthouse

Cost: 166.838§
Lot Size: 3x2
Played: No
Furnished: Yes
Tested: Yes (visited in comm lot mode to check restaurant + bathrooms)

Nightlife and OfB required.
No custom content.


Description:
For sims that are sick of living in the suburbs, Backdoor Lane provides an alternative: a couple of small town lots with a more urban look and feel. They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, creating a maze of backyard gardens and interconnected alleyways when placed in a tightly spaced neigbourhood. Most of them work as corner lots as well as facing the street, creating a very different impression depending on how you place them and what's on the lot next door.




Backdoor Lane 22
is a courthouse -- probably the most representative building in Backdoor Lane so far, and *finally* something I can use those spiffy two-story columns for =). This is modeled along the lines of the two or three courthouses that I've seen for real, i.e. a european model, plus some stuff that I made up (I don't know whether there really are "waiting cells" in courthouses, but I figured they'd be useful so I put them in). Hopefully it'll be clear from the screenshots what's where, I had a really hard time this time cutting them down to just 8.

Ground floor:
- One entrance hall that's going to impress the socks off my sims, complete with security checkpoint and uncomfortable(-looking) waiting benches
- Bathrooms
- One courtroom with specator gallery on the second floor and a back room for the judge + prosecutor/assessor (where they hold their little meeting to decide upon a sentence after everything has been said)
- A canteen -- *not* a fancy restaurant, but your sims can eat here just fine (with extra bathroom)

Top floor:
- Open gallery looking down on the foyer
- Spectator gallery
- The judge's office, with secretary's office and bathroom

Basement:
- Two cells where criminal defendants can wait for their trial (this isn't a jail, so there's no beds in there -- just a chair and a toilet)
- One long kafkaesque corridor
- Archives, where all the old files are stored
- Another bathroom just in case


Fun to be had, in sim terms: Dining out at the canteen, chess, and your sims can sneak into the judge's office and play computer games. I debated with myself for a while whether to put a lie detector in there somewhere, but decided against it.

Seating in and around the courtroom is color-coded for your convenience: brownish/reddish == judge, attorney, defendant etc (i.e. everyone who actually takes part in the trial); green == spectators; purple(ish) == security; yellow == anyone.

The layout of the courtroom and adjoining rooms is luckily quite flexible (I've changed it around a couple of times myself), so you can adapt it if needed: the wall between courtroom and bathrooms can be knocked down + the space used for a press tribune, for example.

A word on the canteen: I haven't seen this while testing, but I guess it's entirely possible that some over-enthusiastic waiter will try to deliver food to the courtroom or secretary's office since the tables I've used in there are actually dinner tables. I'd recommend to lock the doors or change the tables for desks to avoid that from happening.


Performance:
This was surprisingly non-laggy while testing, I guess because there's actually not that many objects in it -- the foyer and empty corridors take up a lot of space.


Pictures:
- Street view, daytime (above). To the left is the side entrance that leads down to the basement; in front of that is enough space for a driveway should you ever need one.
- Street view, night (the first thing my tester sim did was go and disapprove of my gardening =/)
- Backside
- Exterior, detail: Main entrance (with ungrateful sim completely ignoring it)
- Interior, detail: Foyer
- Overview, ground floor: Top left == courtroom, the small wood-panelled room is the back room. At the bottom right is the canteen.
- Overview, top floor: to the right of the stairs is the secretary's office that leads to the main office and bathroom
- Overview, basement: Two cells, plus a lot of storage space for all those old files
- Interior, detail x 4 | top left: view from the door of the spectator gallery towards the front | top right: view from the base of the stairs towards the entrance | bottom left: view from the canteen over to the courtroom | bottom right: canteen in action


If you've trouble downloading this with QXPress, try manually.


Thank you:
This collection (frillen) as well as this one (loba) and that one (windkeeper), the mini lots by Andi8104 and the ones based thereupon (MaryLou) have been very useful in making the Backdoor Lane neighbourhood. Thanks for making them available.

Please don't PM me with neighbourhood terrain requests (look in the Neighbourhoods section instead), downloading issues (I can't help you -- look in Site Issues, Q-XPress forums etc), or Build Mode questions (general questions go here, lot specific questions in the d/l thread). Thanks.