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Whitmore Estate - NO CC

SCREENSHOTS
2,184 Downloads 104 Thanks  Thanks 31 Favourited 7,527 Views
Uploaded: 31st May 2022 at 12:41 AM
I’ve enjoyed copying real-world country houses several times, and decided it could be an interesting project to try to create a sprawling mansion of my own, using a lot of the same design logic. It took a while before I found a style and framing that I was satisfied with, and then even longer to figure out what kind of person would live in it, but I’m quite pleased with the Indiana-Jones-inspired end result that you see here! I’m very tempted to use this as the starting point for a story that I can post to MTS as well as inspiration for a few more pulp-adventure-themed locations that I’ve thought about constructing… time will tell, I suppose!

As you can probably gather from the (deliberately incomplete) story below, this house is set up as if the owner is a wealthy adventurer/philanthropist, who is blatantly cribbed from classic pulp adventure stories. You’re welcome to ignore this, obviously, but I tried to set up the house so that if you chose to send your wealthy Sim residents on global adventures into ancient ruins and buried cities, the home would feel suited to that type of lifestyle, and you can flavor things with their own adventure mementos and souvenirs.

As befits a massive country estate, this is definitely a big and expensive lot, built on 5x6 plot and with more than $1M worth of building and decoration included. I did playtest a clone of the lot fairly extensively, and corrected all the routing errors and such that I could find, so even in the deliberately cluttered basement storage rooms your Sims should be able to walk fairly freely, and the public rooms on the upper floors all have plenty of space too. The lot as uploaded has never been occupied, so no unwanted Sim references should appear.

As always, no CC is used or required for this lot, so as long as you’ve got all the EPs and SPs you should just be able to place this mansion directly into your game and give your adventure-seeking Sims a retirement home to strive towards! Enjoy!



It wasn’t terribly unusual for Director Whitmore to summon staff to his home rather than meet with them at the museum. While he still was nominally the president and executive of the museum foundation, he hadn’t managed the day-to-day operations in years, and his campus office almost always sat empty. Still, calling someone in late in the evening on a Saturday wasn’t normal, even for him, and as he walked up the long brick walk that led to the front door of the towering red brick country house, Henry Walker wondered what was so urgent that the old man had rushed him all the way out here.

The sprawling lawns in front of the house were empty, as always, and the neatly manicured hedges and pruned trees gave a far more polished and severe look to the property than most people would have expected from Whitmore after they’d met him. Only the ivy trailing up the façade seemed unkempt in the way Walker had come to associate with the old man, and he smiled as he climbed the staircase leading to the front entrance, wondering if that might have been a deliberate joke on his part.



The Director’s manservant opened the door for Walker and he stepped into the ornate house’s two-storey foyer. The house itself still bore all the architectural trappings of its turn-of-the-century robber baron roots, but while he was old, Director Whitmore certainly wasn’t so old as to have been the original owner of the property. His own tastes were clear upon closer inspection of just about every room in the house- still clearly the home of a wealthy man, but not one whose interests were focused solely on gaining and exhibiting his wealth.

Walker had often heard staff at the museum joke, sometimes friendly, sometimes… not, about how the museum itself was really just storage for Whitmore’s own personal collection, and that the “real” museum was his house. He’d initially ignored those comments until the first time Whitmore had invited him into the house, and he was astonished by the scope of the collection on display. Nearly every room was decorated with museum-quality relics and artifacts from all over the world, each one from one of the old man’s expeditions. It seemed that each room had enough artifacts from sites all around the world to justify a wing of its own in the museum- bedrooms with fragile textiles and watercolors from the far east, parlors with reliefs taken from the tombs of desert emperors, and buried in the foundation Walker knew there were rooms packed full to the ceiling with even more artifacts that just sat there, gathering dust in a mansion basement rather than gathering dust in a crypt beneath the desert sands or hidden behind a mat of jungle vines.



Walking down the gallery into the cavernous two-storey library that dominated the east wing of the mansion, Walker paused to look at the massive jade panel that dominated the gallery wall- he wondered what ancient temple or tomb it had once belonged in. Whitmore was from the generation that thought upon seeing every relic and artifact imaginable, to quote a famed fictional archaeologist, “it belongs in a museum!” Walker and his contemporaries still got the same thrill of discovery when they found a new tomb or temple, but tempered their zeal with the knowledge that an artifact like this could have so much more to teach if it was still left in the site where it had once been carved. Shaking his head slightly, Walker continued into the library.

The last colors of sunset were fading in the sky beyond the towering windows, but the library itself was mostly dark, the only light coming from the massive aquarium at one end, and a small pool of amber light near the fireplace, where Whitmore sat waiting for Walker to join him.



“Thank you for coming, my friend. I apologize for the late hour, but this is rather urgent, and could not wait until Monday, I’m afraid,” Whitmore said, his nasally voice unusually strong for such an old man. “I know my generation’s approach to the study of ancient cultures and ruins is no longer held in the same regard as it once was, and many of the museum’s employees look on my own collection as unseemly. They may be right, despite my own love for the adventures that led me to these relics… that’s beside the point today, however.”

“I’m sure you’re aware of the satellite-guided archaeology we’ve recently begun undertaking- if I remember correctly you’ve even assisted on some of the surveys yourself. Well, one of our most recent data analyses revealed something extraordinary, and while I know archaeology in this modern age has become far removed from the adventures I had with my colleagues decades back, I think it may be inevitable that this find leads to a bit more adventure than we’re used to seeing today.” Whitmore steepled his hands together, and peered across the table at Walker.”

“So, Mr. Walker, are you interested?”