I AM SO EXCITED!!!! MY BREAKERS MANSION HAS BEEN APPROVED!!!!! I worked so long and hard on that house! I'm so Happy!

Yay! Any plans for your next big project?

Today I happened across the story of Arundells House, a 13th century house that was restored in 1609, so it's a nice example of a genuinely historic restoration. That being said, we can't judge the quality of the restoration because in 1719 someone came along and undid it all by giving it a makeover in the more fashionable Queen Anne style.

My Jacobean mansion is nearing completion now as I've finished the servants rooms and the gallery. I just need to add the finishing touches to the kitchen and a couple of rooms elsewhere in the house.

EDIT: And then I've also been working on another lot which I'm intending on making some kind of abandoned rural Italianate-style mansion/farmhouse. The theme/concept I have in mind is 'palace on the plains', so I'm taking inspiration from the many numerous abandoned houses found scattered across the great plains and the mid-west to some extent too.

@Fergus' Mind yes i have! i started the Tudor i'm redoing! and another mansion from the Gilded Age but its my interpretation Within in the sims

TudorMan23: How very nice for you! Can I just come with a suggestion for your next build? All facades needs a bit of fun, you can add that by having different colors on the different bits and piezes, like the fences could have a slightly different color. Perhaps just a cold one instead. That color you have chosen can soon be very heavy

Fergie: The Arundells house looks really lovely. On your house I would have worked a bit on the color combination. Awesims friezes would have been lovely on that house, but I guess you're doing noCC? I must admit I hate those ts3 windows for most things, but that's just my opinion.

I have done a house in 4 hours in ts4 with no CC. I have tested it and have to make the upload for it. I don't think I can make a video of this one on this comp at the moment, because the sound is so strange. I wonder if I should take my old monitor back instead. At least it had better sound.



I have to send my computer for a repair as soon as the plastic I ordered comes. I'm planning to buy a soundcard for it, but as it sometimes has a screaming issue with sound, so I just have to fix that first.

I don't know what TS is trying to tell me.

@Volvenom I wanted to make the house look as authentic as possible! If i was not trying to copy an historic house then i would have

Modern home packed in an early Colonial style.

(including huge, useless center-chimney)

Oh. My. God. Love it.
What's the internal layout like? I can imagine it's hard to create a modern home when the the main rooms are all centered around back-to-back/3-way fireplaces of the chimney in the centre.

@Fergus' Mind

It is extremely hard, and since I wanted to have these cornered stairs as well, I had to ditch either the stairs or the 3-way fireplace. I ditched the fireplaces, sadly, but mainly because it would look kinda odd in TS aswell, hence the 'useless center chimney'. Other than that I did my best to be historically accurate.
I'm almost done furnishing the main floor, a few details are missing. I also have a room above the garage and I'm not really sure anymore what I wanted to do there. I also created it for the sake of beams.

Actually, I think the whole house was for the sake of them.




I did some freestyle to the layout on the 1st floor to be honest.

Damn, I was hoping you had the answers to my problems there. When I do a centre chimney colonial I always end up using the chimney space to hide a CFE staircase which ends up with separate chimneys poking out the roof. I was kinda hoping there'd be a way of doing it without have to resort to messing about with the chimneys.

Meanwhile Volvenom will either be pleased or horrified to see that's I've made another attempt at modernism...

Home has been sumbitted.

@Fergus' Mind
I've been thinking of possible options for recreating a 'true' center chimney but haven't worked it out yet. I'll see if it's of any use

Oh well. In the meantime I've been going back to my old custom world in an attempt to re-allign the central part of the town so that it's all properly snapped to a grid seeing as I first built it without the snap to grid function enabled. I've done a further building shell around the town square, although there's still a few more to do. I've then got a rather unexciting church that also needs perking up with some architectural tlc.



I've also been doing some work on my big white Italianate house inspired by the Grace Sharp House house in Santa Paula, CA. But I've remembered how hard it is to do a house painted white when different wall coverings and items show the same shade of white in very different tones (see the upper section of the tower). So I've ditched altering the wall coverings for the time being in favour of the garden.

Hallo again. I finally got my computer back, and the pictures look horrible on my phone.

The center staircase, can't you do that opposite? Have the chimney in the middle and wrap the staircase around it? Bravo, I really like the color combinations on post 909

Fergie: that modern house looks very ArtDeco. I would ditch those 2 tile windows on the top right front picture. You have 2 different windows there. I would use the windows at the bottom right instead. You might have something going on there though, since they are not the same. It's a bit of BahHaus style going on there as well. Is the windows from that set on the store? On the back where you have all those windows in a big square like. I would go asymmetrical there and take them to the top or all the way up and down. Nice house Keep working on it.

Lots of nice inspiration going on in this thread.

Since I dear bothering you with my feedback, perhaps I'll pay with some pictures from something I'm doing now.

After the discussion about Brutalisme, I looked around and found a house I like. It's a courthouse, but I just made it into an apartment building. Only problem now is what to do with the rest, should I make decorate them all, or leave that to the downloader?



I have finished the house more or less.



I was gonna make it into a rather simple decoration with very little color, but somewhere along the lines I suddenly ended up with this shocking yellow creation

I am working on so many houses right now! I keep going back and forth between like 5 or 6 of them as you all can relate. I get bored with one or get stuck on where to go jump to another one. but im almost finished with another one that was inspired by the Gilded Age with my own twist on it! Its almost finished! its not as expensive as The Breakers but just as lavish. But this one has a garage unlike the Breakers

Thanks! Yeah, they're different because I was trying to add a little more variation, but I wasn't entirely convinced as to whether that particular window really blends well with the rest, and clearly it doesn't, so it's back to the drawing board...

The windows on the back are basegame. They're only forming a square because there's two levels of them that have come together as a result of the cfe staircase. I may take them all the way to the bottom though as it would be a good way of getting light into the basement, so thanks for the advice!


I don't know how apartments work in TS4 as I don't have it, but if you can use more than one apartment like you can in TS2 then I'd furnish them all, otherwise I'd leave the rest empty. The yellow and orange is really nice, it makes the room a little more lively.

Yes, that sounds like a good system to follow. My impression is it doesn't work in ts4 at all. The elevators are only on the actual floor, and EA has kept a lot of the tech to themselves. Apparently it's too complicated for the players. For me it's more like this game isn't as good as they thought it would be when it was first released, but don't let us start that discussion over again. It's like a gazzillion threads on the problems with this game on the forum.

End of it is, I don't know how to make the other apartments usable to the players. As it looks it can only be used on specific lots in the city world, and cannot be used in other worlds. I'm using a desert like world for this build. That just means the player will have to figure out the use themselves. Perhaps they have a big family, use tons of mods or whatever. It would probably be best to furnish them all. Thanks for the tip.

Here is what i have been working on and off while working on The Breakers. Right now i Call it The Ell Its a 3-story L-Shaped estate

Another wonderful grandly-proportioned home! That master bedroom is practically cavernous!
I love that you've gone to the effort of making a CFE staircase in the main hall, it really adds to the grandeur. :lovestruc

In my game I recently had a break-through with my 'Tea With Mussolini'-inspired Tuscan villa. I was struggling terribly with the CFE join between the older and higher back wing and the lower and larger front wing so I left it on the back burner until the other day when it struck me how easy the solution was. Since then the house has come along leaps and bounds. I'm not sure it's quite Italian enough though.

Hey all. It's been a while. I've been going through a bout of depression and just haven't had the mood for simming or gaming in general. But I'm getting back to normal slowly.

On the FLW inspired house, I added a "pool house" and colonnade along the back that helps make a partial peristyle around the pool. The colonnade also repeats the roof with skylight that I use on the hallway connecting the carport and guest suite at the front with the rest of the home.


Sometime around, I dunno 2012 ish, I was working on a CAW project called Gwen's Valley. It was all typical American styled homes, colonial, Victorian styles, etc. (It's in the background of my Granger Church, Charity Chapel, Carnegie Library and Corner Craftsman uploads.) But I had a little side project where I could really experiment and play around-an artists' colony. Now I've wanted to build a Darmstadt-like world ever since CAW came out. This is about as far as I ever got, and I thought you all might find it interesting.

Even from the overview shot, you can see how I was playing around with paths, roads, and intersections within CAW. The buildings themselves are experiments with wall treatments and roofs, in that kind of Art Nouveau-ish way that integrates new elements into traditional forms (or traditional elements into new forms). Almost all the buildings are in situ (on their not flat lots) so that they could not easily be shared, but so many elements I worked into later creations that I did upload.

More artist colony stuffs.



And I've been working on this:

cutsocks: *posts another work of art as if he is god blessing us with the gift of beauty*
me: *mashes head on keyboard for lack of words comprehending my love and admiration of said work of art*

Cutsocks: you're in the wrong program, those roofs can't be made in ts3

I have been working on walls for my ts4 wentworth woodhouse for a while now. I haven't tested these last one's in game yet. I made the panel cutting piezes from an old door I downloaded. It's looking great in Photoshop I think, but it has to be tested in game. I have made like 9 sets of these walls and floors to fit, it would be a bit of a blow if it didn't work out.

Old Jacobean with animal patterns?



... or just a regular striped one?

How on earth did you manage to fit Wentworth Woodhouse into a single lot?!?! The hall alone could consume a 64 by 64 lot.

The world would have been a very different place if the Stuarts had invented the animal print style *shudders in horror at the thought*

@cutsocks the house you showed us in the post 919 (screenshots 35, 36) is absolutely amazing! Hope you are thinking of uploading it.

Downscaling has worked nicely so far. The hall is still really big. I mean what a useless feature? My biggest problem was the the many floors, they are too many and I'm not sure if running it with more floors than what is above ground, would crash in most games. At the moment I'm working on meshing actually. It's so much easier in a program called MD. All the times I've have to give that up because of the lack of progress for my blog.

... oh yes, I can see Jacobean animalprints in so many houses. They were so close