Life-Like Belvedere Hotel Good Enough?

It is a pleasure searching for new kits in HO scale that might fit my Avenue project.

Most HO scale kits are rather small and often underscale. most model railroaders have a very limited space dedicated to the hobby, so it makes sense to produce models of smaller subjects.

Despite the plethora of kits available in HO scale, finding kits of large city buildings can thus be a challenge. Often you will need to search for kits that have a potential to be kitbashed into a larger building. Such a building is the old Life-Like kit of the Belvedere Hotel, #1339 (above).

The building only have three stories but seems well suited for kitbashed into a larger building. In order to get to know the kit, I first built it straight out of the box, only adding additional weathering and some simple inner walls to keep the beholder from seeing directly through the building.

The worst part about this kit is the oversized bricks. The detail is not bad, but the bricks seems more like O scale (1:48) than HO scale (1:87) and this is where the kit really shows it age.

The windows, especially the smaller ones, are a bit crude, but passable IMO.

The kit includes stairs for the fire escape, which is a prominent feature of large American cities of the time. Unfortunately the parts are quite heavily molded after the standards of today.

In many ways, the Life-Like Belvedere hotel is a very nice kit. It is inexpensive, easy to put together and includes great details such as the fire escape above, the “ROOMS” sign as well as other signs to add to the model.

On the other hand, the kit clearly shows its age, which is rather difficult to conceal despite additional detailing and weathering.The windows also seem a bit too large compared with the rest of the structure.

I am in doubt whether to use the model above, which took an evening to weather and another to build, or perhaps make a larger structure of several kits or perhaps discard it, being too crude? But ordinary, brownstone buildings are not that common, so perhaps the ancient kit deserves some love?

What do you think?