1:144 scale Florida Art Deco
"The Palms" is a Floridan Mediterranean revival style house designed by Pam Scott, initially with how-to's published for 1:48 scale. Later, she published 1:144 scale plans for it in Little Enough News, volume 4, issue 5.
This was the first 1:144 scale structure I built. At the time, 1:144 scale furniture seemed impossibly small to me, so I didn't finish the interior until much later - seven years, in fact.
Interior
I did the bedroom furniture early on, and then ran out of inspiration. Originally, my intention was to do the house in sunny shades of ochre and gold both inside and out (it all started with my painting a sun design on the front door). I think that was a real mistake - normally, I'm not into warm colors, nor monochrome settings...
Once I started looking for more colorful inspiration, I could get started again. The bedroom is still in the ochre color scheme, and compared to the other rooms I think it looks awfully bland. I might have to redo it someday, when I come up with a better idea.
Living room
The DIY section has my how-to's for the sofa table as well as sofa and chairs (using the Art Deco arms variation near the bottom of the page, and large no-hole beads for legs). The floor lamp mainly consists of a pin and a tubular bead.
The painting is by Isaac Grünewald (Swedish-Jewish expressionist painter, 1889-1946).
A classic Ekco AD65 radio sits on the bookshelf.
Where the living room meets the hallway, there's a bronze sculpture (an N scale person stuck on a block of wood and painted).
Dining room
The dining room is very much inspired by an illustration by designer Jacques Meistermann, originally published in Décoration moderne dans l'intérieur around 1930, and later reprinted in Authentic Art Deco Interiors and Furniture by Dover Publications. I copied the over-all color scheme (including the black window frame), table and sideboard design.
The chairs are based on my steel tube chair how-to, with fabric upholstery. For the floor, I cut a piece of 1:12 scale marble paper to fit the room, then scored it lightly in both directions to give the appearance of square tiles.
These paintings too are by Isaac Grünewald.
I was happy to find paintings by him that tied in nicely with the color schemes of the rooms.
(Expressionist paintings aren't my favorite, so the less research needed, the better!)
Bedroom
The bedroom is furnished with the first 1:144 scale furniture I ever designed and wrote how-to instructions for. You find my bedroom furniture how-to in the DIY section.
I made the mirror from full-scale self-adhesive plastic mirror material found in an art supply & home decorating store.
It was sold by the yard - the staff said it's used for making mirrors on board small boats.
The nice thing is that it's just as reflective as a full-scale mirror, but very thin.
When the backing and the protective foil at the front are removed, the actual mirror material is only 0.25 mm (about 1/128") thick,
so it's extremely thin. It cuts easily with scissors and craft punches (I used a 1/4" round punch for this mirror).
Sun terrace
Relax on the sun terrace, reading a good book in the shade of the parasol. Again, please see the DIY's for how I made the table and the sunchair variation of my steel tube chair.
In this case, I was inspired by some poolside furniture in a 1934 design by British architect Oliver Hill,
reprinted in Art Deco house style by Ingrid Cranfield.
The table in the illustration was actually of this design,
but my smaller table fit better next to the parasol.
Palm trees
I'd come across some plastic palm trees at a sale, they had great-looking fronds but I didn't like the stems. So, I painted the fronds as the plastic was a bit shiny, and made new stems using the method described in Pam Scott's palm tree kit (now discontinued), that I'd used with the 1:48 scale house.