REDHILLS MODEL

Redhills, Devon

Some buildings earn their names. Redhills is a contemporary house built into a Devon hillside — three floors stepping down the slope, with the lowest level dug into the ground and the upper two opening outward through generous glazing to take in the countryside beyond. The roof sweeps tall in a Scandinavian pitch, giving the house a strong silhouette against the landscape. It is the kind of house that takes its setting seriously.

It is also, now, a house that contains a model of itself.

The Brief

The house was designed and built by its owners. When it was complete, one of them commissioned Chisel & Mouse as a gift for the other — a way of marking what they had made together. Not a photograph, not a print, but a three-dimensional record of the building in its finished form: something to live with.

It is one of our favourite kinds of commission. No famous architect, no institutional brief. Just a house that matters to the people who built it, and a desire to hold that moment in something permanent.

The Making

We began, as we always do, with the drawings. From these we built a CAD model of the house and produced renders for the client to review — a step that matters particularly for a private house, where the owners know every detail and will notice immediately if something is wrong. Once signed off, we moved to production.

Render of proposed model

The main body of the model is cast in plaster: solid, white, and precise. The window frames are etched metal, picked out separately and fitted into the façade — essential on a house where glass is so central to the architecture. The internal walls and furniture are 3D printed, visible through the glazing. The balustrades are acrylic, catching the light as the real ones presumably do. And the top two floors are lit with warm LEDs, switchable, so the house can be dark or glowing depending on the mood.

Warm LEDs

The finished model measures approximately 70 × 50 × 40 cm — large enough to read as a proper architectural object rather than a trinket. It sits on a white plaster base under an acrylic box.

The Delivery

The model was installed on a sideboard in the house itself.

Finished model.