Villages for the Franco-Prussian War - Part 11: Chocolate Box Alsace House No 2.

The inspiration for this Chocolate Box house, the penultimate model in my FPW Alsacian building series,  draws on this charming building in Wissembourg in the very north of Alsace - a few  hundred metres from the German border, and directly opposite from where I sat with a cold beer on a hot summer's day in 2018.

I decided not to use the wedge shape created where two converging streets in the image meet (although the idea was appealing), but the  thought calculating the angles for the roof with my limited mathematical skills made my brain hurt. So I kept the basic features of the front face - narrow and tall, with a very steep roof pitch and that unique dormer window poking through the half-hipped roof. I decided to put multi-tiered dormer windows on one face and a single wide dormer on the other. It needed more, but with limited roofing material available I needed to keep the foot print small so added a 20mm x 60mm cantilevered balcony on the right hand side. A couple of pent roofs on the back of the building makes the footprint appear larger than it is. A base with space on each side allows the building to be placed alongside those without a base or walled spaces and the plain space in front of the doors allows either face to be used as the front. 

This building has taken much longer than I anticipated largely because of those difficult roof angles, in particular those two dormer windows front and rear were a nightmare to get right. Then there is the cantilevered balcony that annoyingly is 1mm off level and it is noticeable... mind you I shouldn't feel too bad when I remember seeing the well known Maison de Sel in Wissembourg that is just around the corner from the image at the head of the post - at least my roof line is straight! I'm really glad now that I avoided that wedge shape though. That said, I am pleased with the final chocolate box result.

Building number six, a much plainer building is well under way and should be completed in a few more days.

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