Drawing fireplaces... and a give away for who answers the question correctly! 🥳

Hello my friends, 

If you follow my little blog you know by now that most things in my house are packed away. Waiting for the delayed move to our new house. Although I am happy to announce that 15 october wil finaly be the day!! But the mind is restless to a certain point. I can not just stop and put Huis ter Swinnendael out of my mind. It is almost a golem of my own making and will not just go away. 

My solution is to channel that energy into doing what little I can do. And also to not fall into a complete standstill. The situation has led me back to the drawing board. 

For instance I started to cut out shapes for the furniture to go into the miniature rooms that I am builing. This way I can play around with different configurations, just to see what fits best. And help me answer questions such as, should I include a bath or not? 

In the picture above you can see a printout of an over-elaborate parquet design that I might actually use for Lady Zonneschut's dressingroom. But then I will have to print it out twice as large as it is shown here.

On the floor plan of the dressingroom you can see 12 items of furniture. Only one(!) of them is finished at this moment. That is the House Of Miniatures (HOM) Queen Anne candlestand that I have decorated in Crimson & Cream. You can see it in the picture above. 

Three pieces of furniture will have to be made from scratch. (the eliptical wooden  bath tub and the wooden stool to go in it. And the little table used for lace making.) the lace making table is inspired by this picture. 

The little teatable (the rectangular piece of paper in the middle of the room) will be made by a very talented miniaturist. I have ordered that piece from Yosh Sagi. I will show and tell you all about it when it arrives. 

The rest (two rococo chairs, a dressingtable, a Q.A. side table, another Q.A. candlestand and a Q.A. polescreen) are either HOM or Alison Davies kits which I have lying around, waiting to be assembled after the move our new house.

So, still quite a lot to do but I have already gathered most supplies so as soon as I (finaly) can start, it should be a flying start! 

Apart from playing around with the dressingroom I have also drawn a design for the large fireplace in the future drawing room of Huis ter Swinnendael. Like the one in the steward's office it is a late renaissance model that was going out of fashion around 1675 when the house was built, but stil popular enough by patrons of the regent class to want to include it in a new house. Please note the sketchy 15cm (+/- 6 inch) high figure drawn on the far right for size comparison. The fireplace will have a height of 37 cm (+/- 15 inch) which means that the ceilingheight of the rooms on first floor will be nearly 4.5 meters. 

And speaking of the stewards office, in the picture above you can see the (final) design for the finished item and in the second picture you see the upper part that I have already made a while ago. Next will be the supports carrying it. These supports/pillasters will be the shaped like the one on the far right. The ones on the page on the left were rejected. 

And here you see some different  designs for a corner fireplace. They are based on designs in the style of Daniel Marot. The court architect of William & Mary. 

The (right half of the) one on the left is intended for Sir Zonneschut's library. The (right half of the)  drawing on the right is meant for Lady Zonneschut's dressingroom. The design in the middle did not make it into a room of the house. 

The picture below shows my ideas for the kitchen range. It will have three parts (cooking, roasting, baking) seperated by cut stone collumns that support the overhanging wooden chimney. 

 As I am writing this, it feels a bit desperate actually. 😬😁 But it really has helped me during this long wait where I could not realy make anything of the mini's I had already planned. And it has helped me to envision all the steps needed to make and finish the fireplaces that will become focal points in these rooms. Hopefully I will make less mistakes during the build this way. 

But drawing and ordering miniatures (kits) online is not all that I did. When I found a piece of acid free card board that was not yet packed away, I wasted little time to cut it up, to make a start on a few miniatures that I plan on making. 

How do you like this multi occupancy nesting box in the picture above? Or will it be something else? Yes, but what? That is the question. Care to guess? 

The first person to guess correctly, will receive one of the two miniature table theaters that I am currently making as well. It will come complete with a stageset. The pic below shows the rough first sketch of what I'm working on. You could say this is a home cinema set, 18th century style! :-) 

Let's hope that one of you guesses correctly. :-) and the winner can expect the prize to arrive before Christmas! 

Stay safe! 

Huibrecht