GIFTS FOR ARCHITECTS AND ARCHITECTURE LOVERS

Q: Is a model a suitable gift for a child or a student?

Most of the façade models are plaster and will chip if dropped, so they suit a shelf more than a playroom. For a student they're ideal — see the section above.

Buying a gift for an architect is hard, because architects have opinions. The mug with the floor plan on it has been received before. So has the book about the famous building, usually by someone who already owns the building's monograph. What they rarely have is the building itself — cast in plaster, small enough for a shelf, accurate enough to pass inspection from someone who draws elevations for a living.

That is what we make. Every model below is designed and cast by hand in our Sussex studio, finished one at a time, and shipped in a box we've spent years making survive the post. Shipping, taxes and duties are included wherever it's going; gift wrapping and a handwritten message are available at checkout; most orders leave within five working days.

We've arranged the sixteen below by the person you're buying for. If none of them is quite right, the full collection has over a hundred more, and a gift card lets them choose.

For the architect who has everything

Two buildings that are famous among architects and almost unknown to anyone else — which is the point. The Fagus Factory is Walter Gropius's first building, a shoe-last works in Lower Saxony whose glass corners, with no column holding them up, announced modern architecture in 1911; every architect learnt it in their first year and few have seen it. The Lescaze House on East 48th Street is the first modernist house in New York, a 1934 townhouse of glass block and white stucco that William Lescaze built for himself. Either one says you know exactly who you're buying for.

Fagus Factory Architectural Model

£195.00

Lescaze House (manhattan modernist townhouse) facade architectural scale model

Lescaze House Architectural Model

£195.00

For the London obsessive

The Oxo Tower is the South Bank's best joke: a 1929 meat-company warehouse whose windows spell OXO because the planning authority wouldn't allow an illuminated sign. The model is the tower itself, letters and all, freestanding for a desk or shelf. For the bigger gesture, the London Cityscape is the city from the Thames to the City in white resin relief — St Paul's, the Gherkin, the Shard and every street between them in a frame — the one gift that will make a Londoner go and find their flat.

Oxo Tower Architectural Model (Freestanding)

£195.00

London Cityscape (L) — 3D Map of the Square Mile at 1:2500

£600.00

For the New Yorker, or the one who wishes they were

The Breuer Building is Marcel Breuer's granite inverted ziggurat on Madison Avenue — the original Whitney Museum, now a city landmark and the home of Sotheby's — modelled as the front everyone knows: three steps out over the street and one trapezoid window. Engine 55 is the other New York: a 1899 Beaux-Arts firehouse on Broome Street in Little Italy, all arched doors and carved stone, still in service. One is the city at its most severe, the other at its most charming, and both are from the same neighbourhood of opinion about what a building should be.

Breuer Building Architectural Model

£195.00

Engine 55

£195.00

For the interior designer

Interior designers know Villa Savoye from the inside — the ramp, the roof garden, the ribbon windows that Le Corbusier made into a manifesto for how a room should meet the light — and the model gives them the outside, a white box on thin legs that works on a shelf as a piece of sculpture. The Hill House in Helensburgh is Charles Rennie Mackintosh's total work of art, a house where he designed every chair, fireplace and stencil as well as the walls; the model is the austere, rough-cast exterior that hides one of the most beautiful interiors in Britain. Both are gifts for people who think about rooms for a living.

Villa Savoye facade architectural scale model

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Villa Savoye Architectural Model

£165.00 – £195.00

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Hill House Architectural Model

£165.00 – £195.00

For the graphic designer

The Bauhaus Dessau model is the stair-tower façade with BAUHAUS running vertically down it in extruded letters — Herbert Bayer's typography made into architecture, and the single most reproduced image in the history of design. The Isokon Building in Hampstead is where Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius lived in the 1930s, where Penguin's Allen Lane drank at the Isobar, and where the plywood Long Chair was designed; the model is the white concrete deck-access block that every design student has pinned to a wall. For the designer whose bookshelves are organised by colour.

Plaster architectural scale model of the Bauhaus Dessau facade

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Bauhaus Dessau Architectural Model

£155.00 – £195.00

Isokon Building Architectural Model

£175.00

For the Brutalism fan

Trellick Tower is Ernő Goldfinger's West London landmark with its separate lift tower and bridges, the most argued-about building in Britain and now the most loved; the model comes in two sizes. The Armstrong Rubber Company Building in New Haven is Marcel Breuer's five floors of offices hung above a void — a building that was voted the ugliest in Connecticut and is now a net-zero hotel. Together with the Breuer Building above, that's the makings of a shelf. See the full Brutalist collection.

Trellick Tower facade architectural scale model

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Trellick Tower Architectural Model

£125.00 – £175.00

Armstrong Rubber Company Building model photo from side

Armstrong Rubber Company Building Architectural Model

£175.00

For the architecture student

Students draw the same buildings in every school in the world, and these are two of them. Farnsworth House is Mies van der Rohe's glass box in an Illinois meadow — eight steel columns, two slabs, nothing else — and the first building most students are asked to understand. The Monadnock Building in Chicago is the last great load-bearing masonry skyscraper, sixteen storeys on walls six feet thick at the base, the building the structures lecturer uses to explain why steel frames happened. A model of either on a studio desk is a quiet flex.

Farnsworth House architectural scale model

Farnsworth House Architectural Model

£720.00

Monadnock Building facade architectural scale model

Monadnock Building Architectural Model

£155.00

For the traveller with a favourite city

Our cityscapes are maps you can touch: the street plan of a city cast in white resin relief, every block and bridge in place, framed to hang. The Amsterdam Cityscape is the canal rings and the harbour; the Paris Arc de Triomphe Cityscape is the twelve avenues radiating from the Étoile. They are the gift for someone who has a city they go back to — or one they left. See all the cityscapes for New York, London, Venice, Barcelona and more.

Large format cityscape of Amsterdam in a white frame hanging on a grey wall

Amsterdam Cityscape (L) — 3D Map of the Canal Ring at 1:2500

£600.00

Large format Paris Arc de Triomphe cityscape with a pine frame

Paris Arc de Triomphe Cityscape (L) — 3D Map of Haussmann's Paris at 1:2500

£600.00

See them in a room

The hardest thing about buying a model as a gift is imagining it in the recipient's home. Our style gallery shows customers' models on their own shelves, desks and mantels, which is the best answer we have.

Gift questions, answered

Do you gift wrap?

Yes. Choose gift wrapping at checkout and the model will arrive wrapped, with the invoice left out of the box.

Can I add a gift message?

Yes — type your message in the order notes at checkout and we'll write it on a card and put it in the box.

How long does delivery take?

Most models are dispatched within five working days of the order. If you need it by a particular date, tell us in the order notes or email store@chiselandmouse.com before ordering and we'll say whether we can make it.

Do you ship internationally? Will there be customs charges?

Yes, and no. We ship worldwide, and the price you see includes shipping, taxes and import duties, so there is nothing for the recipient to pay on delivery.

What if they don't like it?

We'll refund it. Faulty or broken models are replaced or refunded at our expense; if a model is simply unwanted, return it to us and we'll refund it on receipt — see the refund policy. Bespoke commissions are the one exception.

I don't know which building to choose.

A gift card lets them pick. Or email us with who they are — where they live, what they do, which buildings they talk about — and we'll suggest something.

Is a model a suitable gift for a child or a student?

Most of the facade models are plaster and will chip if dropped, so they suit a shelf more than a playroom. For a student they're ideal — see the section above.