This series of home designs were inspired by pictures of Spanish and Italian homes combined with several trips to southern California and one memorable business trip to the city of Ivrea in Italy. I wanted to try and capture the feel of the small houses I saw on the piazza and near the shore with the little gardens and tight spaces.

The picture on the left gives you a sense of the style of this series of models. Below the picture is a list of the models that I have available here for you to look at.

The Imperial Armada LEGO® model series lent me some key pieces, specifically the arched windows and doors that you'll find in this series. The Armada Sentry model in particular gave me several key pieces, including the arched doors and the thin wall pieces with the arched windows. These arched pieces, along with a cozy little garden nook, are two of the three design elements in this series.

The other key piece you will notice is the large "super-low slope" or "awning" brick. There are three dark-colored ones in the picture on the left. What I wasn't able to do with LDraw is reproduce the gray version of this piece with the textured printing that you can find in the Outback Airstrip model from the LEGO® Outback series. [Actually, that has changed and I need to update the pictures.] That piece reminds me more of a tile roof and reflects what I was trying to capture. A red version of this brick also works well but I would change the colors of the doors and windows to red or yellow.

I wanted to keep these models small. Most will fit on a 16x16 or 16x32 baseplate. I also left at least one of the side walls plain so that several could be built next to each other to make a block of small homes. The special wall pieces can be replaced with ordinary bricks, which will allow you to build another one in this series.

All of these are also made with the "open back" style common in LEGO® models but you can easily close off the interiors and not bother to build them. But if you do that, you'll miss out on building the wide-screen television and other furniture.

Keep building,

Teem