HACME Buildings

Having seen the rather lovely buildings  that Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies uses for his 28mm WWII games I emailed the nice people at HACME Construction Services and asked them how much they’d want for their equivalent for 15mm troops.  At £50 for three of the things I decided to go ahead and placed an order for three terrace/semi-detached  buildings.  Well I’ve finally got them painted.

One of the nice things about HACME is that they allow you to specify exactly what you want. I got a house and shop combination with dormered roof, two houses with a dormered roof and two houses with a plain roof.

The buildings  arrived already undercoated and were very easy to paint.  I chose colours based on what is characteristically found in Normandy, where I took several hundred pictures of buildings during a visit earlier this year.

Brightly coloured shutters may look good, but they’re not very Norman.  I’d estimate that around 95% of houses there have shutters and windows that are a light grey colour like I have tried to recreate on my models.  When different colours are found they are usually a slightly darker shade of grey, dark green or brown and only a tiny minority of buildings have their windows and shutters painted any other colour.   Bright colours are more often on shops than on houses, but they’re still quite rare .  I’ve also looked at large numbers of pictures of Normandy taken in 1940 and it looks like all this applied then as well.

Norman stone is a golden colour and if buildings are harled then painted they are usually painted this colour too.  Roofs are usually grey slate though dark red is also fairly common in some towns and villages.

Two of the pictures that have informed my colour palette can be seen below.

Falaise: this picture was taken from just outside the castle entrance.

St Mere L’Eglise:  part of the main town square.