Building the Ashmore Hotel from Walthers Cornerstone III

Modelling the interior of buildings takes a long time. I usually spend way too much time wondering how to design the interior and when I am finally done, the interior is almost invisible from the outside, because I am too lazy too add lights. 🙂

The interior of the lobby of the Ashmore Hotel would however be quite visible through the large windows, but fortunately the kit included backdrops, that made the rest of the detailing much easier. I made a floor of plasticard and added flower pots made from plastic rod painted red. The flowers are ready-made from Noch. Some old prints from Scalescenes supplied the oriental rugs, while two Preiser gentlemen try to make the lobby seem populated 🙂

The good people of the Railroad Line Forums made a great suggestion about adding sofas from Shapeways to the lobby. I have ordered 3D-prints from Shapeways before with great succes, so the idea was quite tempting, however in the end I figured it would take too long and delay the project too much.

Included in the kit are lots of curtains printed on cardstock to add behind the windows. I added a row at the back of the house, but thought it looked too unrealistic. So instead I constructed a cross from heavy black paper, that would block the view through the building, but still give the impression of space behind the windows.

While I enjoy adding small scenes to the facades of buildings like the Bachmann Ambassador Hotel, the size of this building makes it impractical.

The cross fits snugly, so I left it there with just a touch of glue.

Then it was finally time to move on to the next six floors. I added the original roof to the model to increase its stability, and so far it seems quite sturdy.

The progress for the next floors was quite fast, now that I am in the habit of building the walls. Above I am painting the dark trim om the wall using ordinary masking tape from when I painted our apartment. It works great and is very inexpensive.

After preparing lots of windows, I was ready to assemble the next six floors. The lower floors had a great fit with almost perfect corners, so I was not too worried about the construction.

However I made sure to remove all paint from the surfaces to be glued to make sure the walls adhered to the plastic and not the paint!

Late at night I finished the four walls and could finally glue them in place. 14 floors and counting, so far the largest building I have constructed in HO scale 🙂

The main structure will have eight more floors, and then some sort of tapered smaller floors will added on top, and perhaps some sort of spire? Or an antenna?