During one of my winter vacations from Woodstock, when my dad and stepmother were living in Bangkok, my dad and I did a scuba diving course. Dad had started diving during our year in Hawaii (1966), and I’d been hearing his stories about it for as long as I could remember. Getting certified together sounded like a fun father-daughter activity, and it was.
Our instructor was “Dusty” Rhodes, who had served with distinction in the US Navy during the Vietnam war, and had then settled in Thailand. I did not realize until years later that the preparation he gave us went far beyond typical scuba instruction.
In my many moves around the world, I have brought with me a few items that remind me of specific times, places, people, and adventures in my life. This painting is one such.
While we lived in Thailand, my parents acquired some interesting pieces of original and local art, which moved with us and formed a familiar backdrop to our homes from Bangkok to Pittsburgh to Connecticut. We did not take much when we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, most of it went into storage. Sometime while I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, our household goods were moved from storage in Connecticut to my aunt’s property in Texas, where our old dishware may still be languishing in a disused falling-down barn full of rattlesnakes. I later rescued a few items, including the above which had been painted by our family friend Irma, an artist who owned a Scandinavian design shop in Bangkok.
This build is based on the Australian Federation style of architecture dating back to the turn of the last century. Many Sydney neighborhoods feature rows of charming little cottages in the Federation style, though if you look at the aerial view in Google Maps you can see that most of the original small homes have been extended at the back to add more rooms. For this build I stuck to the original footprint. However, Lego interiors end up much smaller than their real-life counterparts, so what was probably a two-bedroom house in real life is now a studio apartment inside.
Nonetheless, I’m happy with this build. Features include:
The typical asymmetric front (the living room sticks out with a sort of bay window), as seen above.
view through back door of minifig having coffee in her yellow armchair
Windows with colored glass panels top and bottom, shown above. And fireplaces.
close up of front porch with characteristic curved roof
Above: Many Australian homes (from multiple periods) use corrugated tin to roof their front porches, with a characteristic downcurve along the front. The supports for these roofs often feature filigree fretwork which is hard to reproduce in Lego.
close up of murphy bed, closedoverhead view of murphy bed, open
Above: Absolutely nothing to do with Federation architecture, but it made sense for trying to make this into a “liveable” space for a minifig: I built in a working murphy bed. It was too flimsy, however: it broke in a way I can’t fix without tearing down most of the wall. I’ll design it better next time.
low angled front and left view
Above: The red roof is made of sloped bricks that were originally intended to be used to build Lego roofs, but are considered old-fashioned now and not used much in modern builds. I happen to like them and own a lot of them, and they work pretty well for the complex roofs found on many Australia homes.
underside of roof unit
However, modern Lego builds tend to be “modular”, meaning that you can remove roofs and levels to access the interior of a building. Modern builds are also done with narrower bricks (1x instead of 2x studs wide), but I own many of the classic white 2×4 bricks. Building with these meant I could step in the walls at the top and then build a roof unit with an overhang so that the roof fits securely and stays in place, but is easily removed. Most of the interior photos were taken with the roof removed.
Full gallery:
* MOC = “My Own Creation”, in other words a Lego build you invent for yourself. Some Lego creators sell MOC designs.
This was inspired by one of my favorite Instagram accounts, from Sandy Weir, who shares my love of Sydney’s more interesting houses (and has published a book as well). I frequently find inspiration for new builds in the wonderful buildings she shares, though some are difficult-to-impossible to accomplish in Lego.
This particular build started from a house called Elmo in Balmain. I couldn’t find Elmo by virtually walking around Balmain via Google Street View, but I did find what appears to be Elmo’s twin for sale on a real estate site, so I had plenty of reference photos and a floor plan to work from. I also used Google satellite view to get a good look at the roof.
There are some features typical of Australian architecture that are hard to replicate in Lego, such as the fancy ironwork used on balconies. It’s also hard to get Australian roofs right using the traditional Lego roof bricks. Lego’s roofs can have a slope of 45 or 33 degrees. Australian tile roofs seem to be some angle(s) in between.
Australian porches and balconies often have a completely different kind of roof, made of corrugated steel with a distinctive curve at the edges. I’m actually fairly pleased with my solution to that.
This house is very large by Lego standards. It’s hinged so that you can swing it open like a dollhouse to see the interior. Now I’m trying a new version in a style more typical of modern Lego builds, where modularity is achieved by making each floor of a building removable.
School summer vacation in Australia falls December through January, and seems to be getting longer every year — Mitchell won’t actually be back in school til Feb 6th. Not that we mind. All three of us had had enough travel so we elected to stay home in Sydney for this vacation. This is a great time to be in this part of Australia, with lots of entertainment and activities and mostly good weather.
Entertainment
In the last few weeks we’ve seen multiple shows at the Sydney Opera House. All three of us saw Penn & Teller, which I had somehow never got around to in all my trips to Vegas. Very entertaining and confounding.
