Monday, October 12, 2009

The 3-Octagon House

In the past 5 years or so, I've probably built more than a hundred Sim houses. I go through phases where I build ginormous mansions or see how small a house I can build and still be functional. While I'm relatively good at keeping my designs of the overall houses relatively original from house to house, when it comes to decorating the insides of the houses, I tend to fall back on familiar colors or patterns.

I've built a couple of cool new houses recently. The one I built yesterday is my favorite of late. It was for 3 adult siblings and the original concept in my head was to make a house out of 3 octagons all connecting into a central core, where each octagon would be 1 sibling's private living quarters, and the central core would be common areas like the kitchen and livingroom. It didn't come out exactly as planned.

Once I got the front two octagons built, I realized that, architecturally, it would probably be more interesting to have the front two smaller octagons be 1 story and have the back octagon be larger and 2 stories. I decided to try some different roofing and floor and wall patterns than I usually use, including a lot of linoleum which I don't usually use at all, and am really happy with the results. The front 2 octagons are the bedroom suites of the 2 female siblings. The male sibling's bedroom suite is contained within the larger, 2-story common area, which also houses a combined kitchen/dining area, a living room and a study/skills room. A huge deck wraps around much of the larger octagon and I put in a nice garden right outside the dining room window.

Livingroom at back of house w/entrance to deck.

Kitchen (right), dining area (left) and garden (far left)
and kitchen entrance onto the deck.

The study (aka skills room).


Front left octagon: eldest sister's room.


Front right octagon: youngest sister's room


Front corner of main house octagon: brother's room

The outside view. I'm super happy with this house. I'm usually hung up on always having to have a deck but, with this house, I decided to break all my usual rules, so it has a little patio area on ground level but no porch. I used auto roofing, as I most often do, but I used a different style of roofing than I usually use and then used panelling to fill in the wall space below the roofs. Considering that this house is really broken up a LOT (though you can't tell it from this angle), I was really happy that the roof came out looking so good--sometimes, in houses with a lot of angles like this, it comes out really goofy looking and not at all realistic.