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February 2025

The first stage of most projects, after the initial meeting, is to accurately record the architectural details of the house. This is done the old-fashioned way, with a tape measure, and a sketch book mounted on an adapted tripod to create a sort of mobile drawing table. The process of standing in front of a building, looking and drawing is invaluable. Junctions between wall surfaces, nuances of change in the ground levels, the layout of steps and the arrangement of roof details, gables, parapets, gutters and finials are all noted down in a sketch book. Where the details are accessible, mostly at ground level, measurements are taken. Windows on upper floors can be measured from the inside. A little careful leaning out of windows is possible, dropping the steel line of the tape measure down until a metallic clatter signals it is touching the ground. The drawings are often a spider’s web of lines. Sketched features, carefully observed, but for speed, not too beautifully placed on the page, are overlaid with arrows and annotations, numbers and letters. GL – for ground level, TG – to the gutter, FFL – from floor level, R – for return, the depth of a bay or an alcove. This all takes a couple of hours for an average house front and means that the model will be completely accurate. For inaccessible areas, I work from photos. I do a lot of brick counting as well.

Most Victorian brickwork was laid so that four courses measure one foot in height. I prefer to work in metric, converting the imperial proportions of older buildings to centimetres, as I have never been able to cope with 8ths and 16ths, and must resort to the decimal system so my head doesn’t ache. The induvial brick courses are therefore usually between 75mm and 77mm high. The average brick is around 250mm long and 125mm wide. All these measurements include the mortar too, so by simply counting the brick courses on a building the major dimensions can be measured. Georgian bricks tend to be a little slimmer, and with every house where the brick coursing is older, or more unusual, at least 10 courses from ground level are measured to check. Sometimes I am asked to make models of houses which no longer exist, or buildings which are not accessible. Often, the models are surprise gifts, and it is possible to construct a very accurate model without a site visit. This is when the brick counting can prove extremely useful as a method of surveying.

After the measurements are made this data is fed into a drawing program, and after much hand drawing on the computer I will produce some highly detailed plans to work from. These will be sent to the client before I start construction, printed to the same scale as the model. It is at this point that the sense of the size of the model can be taken in for the first time. Liberating the computer drawing from the screen and onto paper makes the prospect of the model a reality. Sometimes at this point I might alter the scale and re-print. Years ago, when plans were hand drawn on tracing paper, like my father used to do in his work as an interior designer, re-scaling a drawing would essentially mean beginning again, scraping the ink from the drafting paper with a blade, starting from scratch.