I started 2 cottages the other day:
One Chicago style bungalow and the other a more modern bungalow!

The first one looks like a home that was for sale in Oak Park a while back. Both look great!

Thanks I wanted to try something a little different than I have been doing especially with the second one!
Yea and the first one was exactly how i wanted it to look!

I found this on Pinterest and I'm impressed, but more angry at the same time.
It could've been an extremely nice and period correct cottage.
And it's so white!

What do you think?

I think if the owners spent as much money as I'm sure they did (tens of millions?) on this house, they can fix it up anyway they want.

I think period correct is great, but I also like original brought into the 21st century. As for the whiteness, Americans have very little imagination. We think white=beach house, and since I'm American, I like it.

I started this project a few months ago with a Cape Dutch style in my mind. I picked it up again a few days ago and this mix of Spanish (colonial?) and Cape Dutch is what I've got so far.
I also see it as a lavish house which owner hosts parties regularly, hence the huge driveway.


I wanted a matching garage and guest house to look like they've been added later on.

I think I've executed that well enough.

Wow! Your use of CFE for the gables is on a cutsocks level of ingenuity! :lovestruc
In terms of style, the shape and ornamentation is very Cape Dutch, but not whitewashing the exterior gives it a bit of a Mission Revival feel.
The more I look the more I see of the clever little details you've added. It's just so awesome.

Thanks Fergus

Garden is almost done. I haven't done anything on the interior besides the layout, and it already costs 280k


Added a poolhouse, because yeah, that's a must for a lavish party home.

Looks great, Johnny. I especially like the porches and all the arcades.

Finally pulled myself away from Civ 6 for a bit. Playing around with a smaller gymnasium that's kinda turning into a school. Then I realized it needs to be ONE TILE closer to the road, so I added a tower for fun. Cause I love towers, it seems. Seriously I have 20 lots uploaded here, and 9 of them have a tower or turret or cupola or something of that ilk.

Thanks


Who doesn't

That garden and landscaping is stunning and matches the intricacy and level of detail that the house displays wonderfully. I like it a lot. It's certainly very lavish.

Meanwhile, I spent an hour building an only managed to come up with a porch....



It's an Elizabeth/Jacobean style porch that will hopefully have a suitable house growing off the back of it.
Although fiddling about with CFE and MoveObjects to make the gable/parapet suitable ornate was a bit of a hassle, but made relatively success with a little inspiration from the gables on your Cape Dutch home Johnny.

P.S. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful architectural details that came with the Island Paradise EP. I'm sure some of them will come in very handy in the near future.

Looks Fantastic @Fergus' Mind! Cannot wait to see the rest of what you come up with

Now i am complete with my simified breakers mansion now to take pics and come up with a goo description for the house I am always bad at that

I love the detailing and pattern you've created with the brickwork.



Were you perhaps locked away at the top of a tower in the middle of nowhere as a child? With only your long flowing golden locks for company, but occasionally interrupted by a haggard old woman who insisted on climbing up the outside of the tower via your golden locks instead of having a proper door installed?





And just like that, the porch sprouted an Elizabethan/Jacobean manor house with earlier Medieval wing. I was originally going to make it a Victorian knock-off/Jacobethan style house so that I could add a bit of Gothic Revival in with the mix and have some nice steeply pitched roofs with a cavernous attic. But the steep roofs competed too heavily with the gable ornamentation and so I decided to go full Tudor/Stuart and have a flat lead roof, but that didn't turn out very successfully and so I had to come up with what it has at the moment. Which I think still looks relatively authentic, despite the fact that it prevents the roof space from being used for alcohol-fueled Tudor roof parties which sometimes resulted in guests falling to their death. It also prevents me from making a cavernous attic and so I've had to compromise there and have a cellar instead.

I'm now at the stage where I'm furnishing the interior but there's a lot of big rooms that I'm not sure what to do with. I have about seven or eight un-designated reception rooms, in which I was planning on having a saloon/parlour, drawing room, dinning room, library, study and maybe even a ballroom. But I can't seem to decide which rooms are best suited for which purpose, particularly as I currently have the kitchen in the cellar/basement but am considering bringing it up to the ground floor for practical reasons but don't as yet know where it would best be situated either. If only I had these kinds of problems in real life



At least writing the description is the final stage. Have you considered making part of the description the actual history of the Breakers and then the rest can be the build details such as lot size, cost, no. of rooms e.t.c.? You could then write a bit of an evaluation about your favourite parts of the build and your not so favourite parts of the build. I know I always like reading those kind of personal details when thinking about downloading another person's creation.

@Fergus' Mind The manor looks very authentic! Love the color and texture of the brick!

And i never really thought about the back story yet! I'm not really that good at it!

The porch turned into a nice mansion, @Fergus' Mind. But personally I'm not too fond of the medieval bit attached to it.

Meanwile I've been experimenting a little decorating the interior of this home with the In-game possibilities.





I'll make the ceiling less eye-soring white.
Also the first time I've used fabrics as wallpaper.. I like it.

The use of the fences for ceiling ornamentation is really quite ingenious, although the particular ones you've used are a bit too rustic for that kind of ornament as they're the cracked/damaged ones. If you look near them in the catalogue, there should be an almost identical group of fences made out of brick which don't have the cracking and distorted edges, one of which is fully CAStable so you can substitute it for the ones you've use at the moment to provide a nicer more refined finish.

Also, POCKET SLIDING DOORS :lovestruc :lovestruc :lovestruc
That interior is so gorgeous and colourful, I just adore it. :lovestruc And that Italian Renaissance style exterior is awesome too.


Yeah, I get that it's a little rustic in comparison with the main wing of the house, but I just feel it's nice to have that connection to what could have stood on the site before someone came along in the Stuart era and pulled down the majority of the old house so that they could build something entirely new and fashionable. If I stick it on a bigger lot I may alter it a bit and see what I can come up with,

Whilst I've been investing some spare time in finishing some lots ready for upload, I've also be putting up new designs/ideas. My most recent of which is an old English pub of Medieval/Tudor origins with a later Jacobean front range. The pub however, is going to be called "The Gallows" or "Gallow Hill" as I'm drawing on the tradition of them doubling up as the local courthouse. Then with this example the subsequent executions took place on site, usually on the gallows under the big old tree atop the rock behind the pub. I know it's a little morbid/dark, but I just thought it'd be cool to do as I've never really done a pub/tavern before.

Now I've used the simple fence from the DIY build set, and changed the ceiling colour.

Well the blue room now is the parlor.

Oh, looking good, Johnny. It greatly reminds me of some Andrea Palladio designs, with the smaller upper "attic" windows. Your interiors are exquisite. The ceiling has worked out amazingly.

The details on your Jacobean manor, Ferg, are fantastic. The bits from IP that you use to make a "sweep" with the railing on the front window bays--that's my favorite part. And for some of the bits you've made a broken pediment or sorts, and that made me shriek with joy! But I'm a bit with Johnny--just not digging the medieval part that well. You tavern with the gallows is awesome. Using the tree as the gallows is genius.

So whatever that thing I was working on tried to be a small school, but I wasn't feeling anything. I might rebuild it again, with much rearranging and turn it into a military academy. But have no fear, I was otherwise getting excited about making a school. So I've been toiling away on a 1920s Collegiate Gothic high school. I am like way out of practice too, I spent WAY TOO LONG on the stairwells--but then that moment when you send a sim to route test and everything works perfectly--worth it. Not going to furnish the basement, outside the locker rooms which have the appropriate stuffs in them. I get so much stupid fun working out floor plans, but I forgot to plan for an auditorium/theater. So there is a tiny pity stage in the tower room. Poor neglected drama kids... Most of these schools were heated with coal, so they had giant coal broilers with smokestacks. That's almost as iconic for me as the gothicky details. There are 21 classrooms (not counting the basement rooms), so not quite the small academy idea I had originally.

Thanks. I always felt like that tree was designed for that purpose and finally I had the opportunity to use it. I'm going to try putting the Jacobean house on a bigger lot, which will then allow me to move the medieval wing away from the house a bit more or do away with it altogether in favour of something more refined. But for the time being, the medieval wing stays.


That's amazing, the tower room is really rather cool. Although I'd dread having to furnish something so big. You also forgot to add that bizarre maze of dark and sinister basement tunnels most fictional American high schools seem to have in the event of monsters, murders and Hellmouths alike.

Meanwhile I've set myself the task of not doing anymore new designs and instead working to finish off or ditch as many of my unfinished ones as possible. One soon to be finished and uploaded is a New Orleans themed home which was supposed to be a little foreboding and decadent, hence the neglected kitchen garden, but it's somehow gotten rather cheerful. Fortunately the interior has managed to maintain the desired feel. The interior is near-on finished, and so I'm moving onto the landscaping. I borrowed an idea/technique from Johnny with regards to the bases of the porch columns and am still debating whether it really "works". For the sake of the design, the columns have to overhang the foundation a little, so that's what I'm trying to cover up.

Those cube things work for a standard height foundation, kind of.
Hiding columnbases is still one of the things to figure out

Oh, Ferg, those crow step gables! Love them. They always (to me) make buildings seem like they are very old (well, as old as you can get for architecture here in The States). The house looks great, but definitely not foreboding at them moment. I like using those display cubes as well (cause they are foundation height and columns stack on them they can hold up statuary effectively). Not loving the double stacked cubes for the column bases though, but aside from raising up the terrain in the front so it's only normal foundation height and/or bushes, I can't really come up with another solution.

With your love of Southern US architecture and porches, I like to imagine you were a Southern gentleman in a former life. Something along the lines of Dill Sheppard from American Dad, lounging on the veranda, mint julep in hand, lamenting about this unbearable heat...

Been playing around with a post office building, which, of course, is especially useless in Sims. Kinda working toward at Art Deco, experimenting with not having an entrance-oriented focal point by having multiple glass vestibules instead. Also never thought I'd ever use that surf board fence from IP, but lookee at that! I guess I tackle the column base issue with a 1/2 wall height foundation and the Basic Wall fence, but that doesn't work for columns centered on a tile.

@Fergus' Mind How about using a "three levels high" column and bury it partialy in ground with either decorators best friend or Nraas debug? Then you can just use some pretty object to fake the column base.

OH OH OH OH. Creative epiphany! Tis a useless post office no more! Well, still a post office--but zoned consignment shop! Who goes to a consignment store to sell things locally when the whole world is potentially your customer when you list stuff online? And where do you go to send out and pick up online orders? The post office. It feels so good to not make yet another cosmetic community lot. So good.

Good suggestion with the debug object shifting. I've only done that a few times, and with, debug at least, I've found that objects sometimes don't disappear when you switch floors. But that wouldn't be a problem with multi-story columns, because they don't drop anyhow.

EDIT:

That meh feeling when the game won't let you put a 2x2 half-gable roof in the direction you want, and you are stuck with a shoddy 2x1.

That's just a horrible thing to happen.

That's so cool! I love how you've done the glass vestibules! And the way you've used that fence... Genius!


Thanks for the suggestions! Before going to the effort of installing Nraas, I figured I'd have a look and see what else I could find to try. I was unwilling to raise the ground level noticeably as I wanted it to look grander and more like it had been built to withstand a flood by being built on such a tall foundation/plinth. But I found that if I raise the ground just a little I could use one of those pedestals from SN, which I think rather completes the look, and together with the landscaping nearing completion it makes the house pretty much ready for upload. However there's another house I want to finish and upload beforehand.



If I were any southerner I'd have been Blanche Devereaux. Although I can't abide hot weather and humidity. So I'm very good at sitting around complaining about how ungodly the weather is, although my drink of choice is something sweet and fruity with lashings of vodka. As soon as the temperature climbs above 29 degrees celsius I just lose the will to live, so life in a hot climate probably wouldn't go down that well with me. Hence why I live out the fantasy through the sims instead.



That occurrence is like a metaphor for life, in that it can sometimes be so very cruel or maybe it's the sims embodiment of 2016...