H0 (1:87) scale Moomin House

Finnish authoress Tove Jansson (1914 - 2001) wrote a number of children's books about the friendly Moomintrolls.

They're a happy family, living somewhere in Finland close to the sea and the big forests. They sleep through the cold and snowy winter, but during the rest of the year their lives are full of both adventure and cosy evenings. Lots of friends with very different personalities come and go at their house.

It's really possible to read Moomin books as a child and enjoy the adventures, and later read them again as an adult and see entirely new dimensions of the stories.

Exterior

The Groke (to the left in the photo above) is thought to be a dangerous creature. When she approaches, the sun is clouded and a chilly wind starts blowing. As she steps on the lawn, the grass freezes and dies under her feet. She seems to be looking for warm and beautiful things, but flowers freeze and die and fires are put out when she comes near. Maybe she's just very sad and lonely. Moominpappa is at the porch, unaware of the Groke.

I cut individual shingles for the roof, from H0 scale 1"×10" wood strips. Each shingle is 5 mm (3/16") long. I stained them before gluing them on. The windows, door, and porch railing are plastic components from Grandt Line.

Interior

The house is scratch built, and so are the beds, tiled stoves, and kitchen fireplace. I also designed and made the living room chandelier.

All the other furniture is H0 scale plastic furniture - I built this house way before I started making 1:144 scale furniture, and H0 seemed awfully small to me at the time.

Moominmamma is making gingerbread in the kitchen, and Moomin gets to taste it. The Moomin family, and the Groke, are all made from polymer clay.

The bedrooms on the upper floor. Moomintrolls are fond of tiled stoves so I put one in each room - according to one of the Moomin books, the Moomintrolls' forefathers used to live behind tiled stoves.

Each room has a working lamp; I hid the wires behind the tiled stoves. The Tiffany style bedroom lamps are filigree bead caps; I reshaped them, painted them black or lead grey, and filled the holes with glass paint.

For the living room I made the chandelier from a couple of metal rings, some ultra-thin wire and 15/0 beads. I used wire rather than thread so that I could adjust the shape of the finished chandelier - a few tiny beads don't have enough weight to make thread drape like a chain of prisms in a chandelier does.