History

Like many castles, the current structure is not the first to be constructed on the site. The original building was a single turret structure inspired by Mother Gothel’s tower from Disney’s Tangled (designed by Claire Keane and Lisa Keene). Castle Araluen 1.0 was more modern in style than Mother Gothel’s tower and far less complicated architecturally than both it and the current castle.

However unlike real life castles it wasn’t money that influenced the building’s grandeur, no the most significant factor was that of the artist’s skill. Meaning, that my first attempt at building a castle turret, very much looked like a first attempt! (See pictures below). To be kind to myself, it was the very first model I built entirely from scratch of my own design in Blender and while I learned a lot creating it, it wasn’t exactly beautiful. So I went back to the drawing board or to be correct its modern equivalent of the graphics tablet and came up with Castle Araluen 2.0.

The current castle is inspired by my love of English Regency architecture and French Renaissance architecture with art deco geometric influences. It is heavily influenced by one of my favourite TV programmes - Château DIY (where people renovate French Châteaux) because why do something simple?! It was a huge challenge, but I’m so glad I pushed myself. It is literally my dream castle.

Sketch

I started work on version 2.0 by taking my single turret, mirroring it about a plane a few blender units away, then adding a third scaled up turret at the point of an equilateral triangle when viewed from above. Next I connected the turrets with some simple wall extrudes to create a rectangular central section of the building. After that I mapped out the two side wings to create the basic building shape. Finally I blocked out some simple windows in various styles.

I then brought a screen grab of this basic building into photoshop and sketched out the final details you see above. This concept was not a one and done sketch, it evolved over time as I experimented and learned new skills in blender. But it isn’t the final design either, you’ll notice that the front door and portico area is quite different in my sketch. This is because I decided I wanted to make more of a feature of the pillars, by taking inspiration from the pillars of my beautiful harps.

Inspiration

Behind the DESIGN

The inspiration for Castle Araluen 2.0 is pretty eclectic as I’m a bit of an architecture geek. The are elements of lots of buildings that have captivated me over the years.

But without doubt the biggest influence on the design of Castle Araluen was the place I called home for seven years - my school. I had the privilege of going to school in a grade 1 listed building and gardens. I earned my place there by way of a music scholarship and it is undeniably where my love of grand old buildings and beautiful gardens originates. For example there is a huge orangery at one end of the building that today houses the stage (where we did many of our concerts) but that was once home to exotic fruit trees. Although I never saw it in that configuration I often imagined what it would have been like to walk through the vast hot house full of citrus trees.

While deep in grounds there are several Victorian glass houses where we did all of our orchestra and choir rehearsals that were originally designed to house camellias and other exotic plants. They were unconventional spaces to practice and hone our music skills but they were beautiful and inspiring as were the views out over the terraced lawns, formal gardens and giant specimen trees.

My friends and I shared a tower room for a couple of years and we used to love standing at the balcony windows watching the storms roll in during the summer months illuminating the great trees with lightning. Those were moments where it felt like we lived in a fairy tale…they were rare and far between due to all the assignments and exams, but they were there!