1:35 Koupelna

The most human room of a diorama

A bathroom is an unusually strong element in a model scene, because it is the one room the viewer can measure at once against their own body. A bathtub, a washbasin and a bowl have real dimensions that everybody knows by touch, and in 1:35 scale they therefore work as a precise yardstick. If you put a figure beside them, nobody asks any more how big the scene is.

The set is made up of resin castings complemented with a fret of photo-etched parts, which usually carries the thin elements that could not be made fine enough as a casting: taps, holders, pipe brackets. The combination of both materials is essential for fittings of this kind, because it is precisely the thinness of the fittings that tells a convincing interior from a toy.

Where to place it in the scene

Interior fittings are most often used in two ways. Either they stand inside a cutaway house, where the viewer sees them through a missing wall, or they lie outside in the rubble instead, thrown down from a floor that no longer exists. The second position tends to be more eloquent: a bathtub in a pile of rubble says a whole sentence about the fate of the house, whereas a bathtub in its place merely states that there was a bathroom there.

Preparation

The castings call for cleaning off the casting remnants and degreasing before painting. White sanitary ware is not painted in pure white, which looks flat at a small scale; a light shade with shading into the joints is better. The package does not hold walls, a floor or paints.

Seat the bathtub before the surrounding floor. Its upper edge sets the height of the tiling and the level of the floor tiles, and with the opposite order one of those usually does not fit.