BUILDINGS · INTERMEDIATE
Village Houses
A nativity village isn’t about how many houses you have. It’s about three or four well-placed buildings, joined together at different heights, with little passages between them. Ten identical houses in a row don’t look like a village. They look like a subdivision.
Five village principles
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Join them, don’t space them
In an old village, houses touch, share walls and lean on each other. Separate houses with yards around them look like a modern suburb.
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Vary the heights
Never make two neighbors the same height. Give them at least one story of difference, and never line up the rooftops.
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Follow the slope
The houses follow the land. A house lower down has its roof at the level of the next house’s front step. That stepped look is what makes it feel like a hilltop village.
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Leave passages
A lane, an arched passage, a staircase between two houses. They hint that the village keeps going behind. See stairs & streets.
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Don’t face them all forward
Don’t line the houses up facing the viewer. Turn each one 10 to 30 degrees from the next, and the village stops looking like a stage set.
Materials
- ¾- to 1¼-inch (20–30 mm) extruded polystyrene foam, or doubled 3/16-inch (5 mm) foam board
- Heavy cardboard for templates
- Wood strips for lintels, shutters and balconies
- Fine spackling
- Utility knife, scriber, metal ruler, square
- White glue, low-temperature hot glue
- Matte acrylics: yellow ocher, red ocher, umber, white, Payne’s gray
- Natural sponge, stiff-bristle brush
Building the shapes
The quickest and sturdiest way is to build each house as a closed box, even if one side will never be seen.
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Cut the four walls flat
Watch the corners: two opposite walls are the full width, and the other two are shorter by twice the thickness of the material. Get this wrong and the box comes out crooked.
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Dry-fit
Tape it together with masking tape to make sure it’s square before you glue.
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Glue and weight it
Use white glue and let it dry overnight. Hot glue is faster, but the corners break if they get bumped.
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Set it on the terrain before finishing
Set the plain box in its final spot with a figure next to it. Now’s the time to fix the height or angle, not after you’ve carved the walls.
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Cut the base to the slope
A house on a slope needs its base cut at an angle, not propped up on a scrap of foam. Trace the ground line in pencil with the house in place, then cut.
Façades
Three treatments cover nearly every style:
| Treatment | How | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Exposed stone | Carved in irregular courses, like the stone wall | Provence, mountains, Italy |
| Lime render | Fine spackling sponged on, letting the stone show through in places — at the corners and under the windows, where render flakes off | Provence, Spain, Latin America |
| Half-timbering | Thin strips glued onto a light background, as posts, braces and St. Andrew’s crosses. The timbers are never perfectly vertical | Alsace, Northern Europe |
Whichever you choose, the same rule applies: worn plaster looks better than new. A perfectly smooth wall looks brand new, and a wall without any bumps doesn’t catch the light.
Doors and windows
This is where you make or break the scale and realism.
- Sizes for 3-inch figures: a door is 3¼ inches high by 1½ wide, a window 1¼ × 1 inch, and a small high window ⅝ × ⅝ inch. See the scale chart in sizes.
- Few and small. Old houses in southern France have few openings, to keep out the sun and wind. Three per wall is plenty.
- Not lined up from one floor to the next. Perfectly aligned windows are a modern thing.
- Always cut in, never painted on. Set them about ⅛ inch deep to create a shadow. The shadow is what makes the opening look real.
- Matte black behind each opening, except the ones you plan to light, which get tracing paper behind them.
- A header and sill in lighter stone or wood, sticking out slightly.
The details that make it lived in
What makes a village feel lived-in is a dozen little details. Each takes about ten minutes and makes a huge difference:
- A woodpile against a wall, on the sheltered side.
- Laundry on a line stretched between two windows.
- Shutters, one open and one closed on the same façade.
- A stone bench by a door.
- A jar, a barrel, an upturned basket.
- A gutter, a downspout, a jutting sink stone.
- A climbing plant on a wall, a tuft of grass in a joint.
- A wooden sign for the baker’s shop.
- An outside staircase leading to the upper floor — very typical of southern villages.
Spread them out unevenly. One very detailed house next to two plain ones looks better than three equally decorated houses. The eye needs something to focus on and places to rest.
How many houses
Fewer than you think.
- A 20-inch nativity: two houses plus the stable. The rest is landscape.
- A 3-foot nativity: four or five buildings, with two of them joined.
- A 5-foot nativity: seven or eight, in two groups with open space between them.
Open space is what gives a sense of scale. A village crammed edge to edge looks like a pattern, not a place. And remember that every house needs a reason to be there: a trade, someone who lives there, a figure stepping out the door. See the trades.