In our family it is quite normal to create phony stories about non-existent people and places,
often as a way to improvise a solution to a problem or finding an answer to a question that has emerged.
This project started with a simple question from my stepdaughter:
Are you aware that children can get flat-footed from living in brick houses, walking on concrete floors?
They had been discussing homes and housing at school, and had been gathering arguments supporting why we should rather live in wooden houses
than in houses made of bricks or concrete. And since our house is a brick house, she wondered if it was likely that she would become flat-footed.
Had I become flat-footed after living in a brick house until I was fourteen? We had to check my footprints.
My footprint clearly showed I hadn't become flat-footed, so there was no danger of that.
As a visualization, I made a quick construction of a cellar in SH3D, just to show her how the floor of the cellar laundry-room in the house where I grew up, was covered with wood mats. These wood mats served two purposes:
One was to ease the strain on the legs and knees from standing and walking on the hard concrete floor, and the other was to keep our feet dry.
Since there were no plumbing attached to the wash basins, the wastewater went straight to the floor, where it flowed into a large drain
in the middle of the room.
However, after having constructed the cellar, we both felt compelled to erect a house upon it – and so a story started to unfold:
We should build an Ugly Mansion, and it should be the residence of a Corsican witch named Laria Cagna Francése, where she lived
with her lesbian lover,Bambola Cartoni and a cat named Frank.
We then decided that The Ugly Mansion was to be situated in Sweden, in a village called Trädstad (meaning: The wooden village).
The Swedish culture is deeply funded upon the love of trees. Trees are in fact so deeply rooted in the Swedish culture that
most Swedes have a word for trees, wood, leaves or foliage embedded in their surnames.
Words like:
Gren, (branch),
Blad (leaf ),
Kvist (twig),
Lund (grove of trees),
Lind (linden),
Ek, (oak),
Gran (spruce, fir),
Tall (pine),
Hassel (hazel),
Björk (birch),
Asp (aspen)
Lönn (maple),
combined with words like:
Ström (water stream ),
Sand (sand),
Fors (rapids),
Sjö (lake)
Berg (mountain),
Sten (stone)
Söder (south),
Nord (north),
Väst (west),
Öst (east),
This can be used to construct a number of common Swedish family names:
Lindstrøm, Ekblad and Sjögren – or switch them around; Ekström, Lindgren and Sjöblad, and so on...
In our story, the natives of Trädstad didn't approve of an alien witch challenging the local traditions by building a brick house in their midst, so they erected a bonfire in the centre of the village, placed the witch on top of it (together with her lesbian lower), and lit the fire.
Unfortunately a sudden gust of wind emerged out of nowhere, as by an act of God, and in a jiffy the entire city had caught fire from the
flying embers – and Trädstad burned to the ground. The only house still standing after the fire, was the Ugly Mansion – now called Villa Laria.
The village was rebuilt ( in concrete and steel) and Villa Laria was bought and completely redecorated in 1993 by the famous Swedish painter Xyllo Engren
and his x-stepdaughter, the multi-instrumentalist Snällan Granberg.
They were both big fans of Woody Allen.
In the background we can see the new Trädstad City – rebuilt in concrete and steel.
The cellar:
Stairway down from the garden, with ramps for wheelbarrow, pram, bicycles and what have you...
The stairway down from the ground floor.
A bigger view.
The ground floor :
As seen from the hall.
The entrance, with the stairway to the first floor.
The sitting area
The music
Desk and door to the kitchen.
The kitchen.
Entrance hall with door to the cellar.
Entrance hall with door to the cloak room
First floor :
Bedroom-daylight
Beedroom at dusk, seen from the balcony.
Bathroom
Second floor / library
Library seen from kitchen
Library seen from terrace
(This image took 8 hrs to render in 2k. View original size )
Kitchen and dining area
Kitchen and dining area exterior view
All images rendered in 2560 and downsized to 1280, using the Simple photo rendering plugin.
Exteriors rendered with Lanczos filter and antialiasing 2 min 3 max
Interiors rendered with Gaussian filter and antialiasing 2 min 3 max.
Sky brightness @ 12
The entire project file is 1.29 GB.
Xyllo & Snällan are wishing you all a great weekend – and so am I [:)]
Cec
