Quarter Scale Coaching Inn

The next-farthest-along in my project is the Tanglewood Hall kit from Petite Properties. Rather than using it as a house, it will be part of the inn frontage. In my mind, the inn started smaller, and then took over the space next door. Coaching inns tend to have two types of frontage on a high street: either the inn's rooms run along the high street, or there is passageway back to the inn yard, where the majority of the rooms are. This allows the space around the passageway to be utilised for shops. I decided to make my inn a bit of a hybrid. So there will be a shop and a dressmaker/milliner's office on one side of the building, with a loft above them that's additional sleeping space for the inn. As part of growing and taking over some of this space, the inn added a second, main kitchen (more on the first one much later), and a bedroom upstairs. The kitchen needs to work double-duty, as I learned that lower-class passengers on the stagecoaches would have eaten in

The first building to be approaching anything close to completion in my project is the Traveller's Rest building. In addition to the coachway that will lead to the yard and other buildings, it has four other rooms: a waiting room, a booking office, a private parlour, and a bedroom. I built the building pretty substantially out of order, in so that I could do the panelling in the easiest manner, and also to wire it for lighted fireplaces from  Herdwick Landscapes . Because of course my first project wasn't ambitious enough, so I needed to do some electrical with it! It's only been in the last couple of weeks that the actual structure has come together. I did the wood floors upstairs relatively early, using hardwood strips from  S. H. Goode , but I needed to get the panelling and fireplace in on the ground floor to understand its footprint in order to do the floor. This I did with  Stacey's Miniature Masonry  flagstones - all of the ground floor rooms in the projec

More than a year ago, now, I came across Petite Properties' Traveller's Rest . I've long had an interest in dollhouse miniatures; I love to look at little things on Etsy, but I'd never actually attempted anything in miniature before. Somehow, though, I knew I needed to do this. I'm a little obsessed with coaching inns -- although it probably wasn't actually so fun to travel in the Georgian era, the romance of it really resonates with me. So I decided I was going to give it a go, and try to turn Traveller's Rest into a coaching inn. Possibly this was completely crazy to take on, given 1:48 is so much smaller than even traditional dollhouse sizes, but what I actually found as I got into it was that as long as I went slow, things (mostly) went okay. It quickly became apparent, though, that ONE 1:48 house wasn't going to be sufficient to hold everything a coaching inn should, and I really wanted to give it some architectural and historic accuracy. I pic