In many other country houses of that kind of size, the upper levels, without any of the grand reception rooms and bedrooms, will by now have been divided up in to small apartments which are lived in by member of the family or tenants of the estate. Hampton Court Palace was divided up into 'Grace and Favour' apartments for widows and those favoured by the crown who were down on their luck and needed a place to live for free. It is more likely that in a house such as Highclere, the upper levels would have been made into a house-within-a-house for the family to live in. This house-within-a-house would have been much more modern and manageable to live in on a day to day basis and much less demanding on a cash strapped family. These families don't have nearly the kind of money you would think they have, which is why so many country houses have been demolished, because the families simply couldn't afford to keep the houses standing. I could go on forever lecturing about the decline of the English Country House, and enjoy it, but instead I'll simply share this song.

OK, well then now I have to decide whether to create the upper floors as if they're part of the house during its prime, and fill them with the expected collection of turn-of-the-century furnishings, or whether it'd be more fun to create the kind of modern apartment that you suggest! Both could certainly be fun approaches to take... By any chance, do you have photos or a site you could point me towards to get a better idea of what one of these modern houses-within-a-house would look like? And yeah, I knew that a lot of these famous English country homes are owned by nearly-bankrupt families- my understanding is that part of the reason why Downton Abbey is able to actually film IN Highclere Castle is that the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon are using the payment from the filmmakers to help keep the estate solvent.

Well, the house-within-a-house would really be your standard run-of-the-mill modern family home, if they are made up from former servants' rooms then there's usually very little in the way of period features, they would be accessed by one of the back stairwells. If you want to do servants quarters in their prime, the thing that spring to mind at the moment is a film called Gosford Park, it portrays both the service rooms below and the servants quarters above the state rooms. I'll see if I can come up with some images or a website. Otherwise, for the modern day living of a country house is best depicted by a English television show called Country House Rescue, it offers a very blunt view of the way these houses are lived in nowadays. From what I remember, some of the houses on that show had the modern apartments/house-within-a-house that I've been talking about.

OK, yeah, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to justify calling this house "playable" unless people have a lot of patience or a really fast computer- I'm only done with one floor, and it's already well north of $750,000, but stylistically, I'm quite happy with how the interior is coming along! At this point I haven't done much on the servant's areas or the upstairs bedrooms and guest rooms, but here's a few shots of some of the public areas of the house- these are based (as much as possible) on actual shots of these rooms in Highclere Castle. By all means, let me know what you think/what you'd suggest/what problems you see/etc!

Damn.. And I was worried about one of my creations just breaching the 200,000 Simoleons mark.

Just looking at those pictures justifies the hefty price tag. What you've done so far is gorgeous! And it's great that you've remembered the fireplaces as when the house was built, fireplaces were still the best (and sometimes only) choice when heating a house of this size, so the vast majority of the rooms, both public and private/servant, would have had a fireplace to heat them; so that's just something to bare in mind.
P.S. It might be soon time to consider splitting the thread in two; one for Downton and one of Woolaton.

Definitely worth two threads at this point, though it'll probably be a while before I have much of anything new for Wayne Manor... I keep running into whatever the Sim-version of a writer's block is! I'll try to limit my posts on THIS thread to ones about Highclere/Downton from here on out though.
I don't love the upstairs of my Sim-version of Highclere as much as I do the public areas on the main floor, but I'm not really sure what can be done about that... I've looked at lots of real-world photos of the bedrooms that are actually in that castle, as well as photos of other bedrooms from similar country houses, and they're almost never as wow-inducing as the public spaces (not surprising, but still disappointing from a design standpoint). I think I'm doing a fair job of copying the styles in most cases- it's just not as ornate or ostentatious as the main floor areas, and so it kind of feels like a letdown beyond the first floor. If there were just a few bedrooms, it'd be less of a problem, but this house has two floors that are almost exclusively bedrooms, so I'm running out of ideas faster than I'd like. Any ideas on how to bump up the wow-factor on a turn-of-the-century old-money-family estate's bedchambers would be more than welcome! (I'll try to post pics later, but at the moment, I need to go to bed, or I'll be too tired to talk to people at work tomorrow! )
I'd also welcome ideas on things to incorporate into the servant's spaces- there's the obvious en-suite rooms for storing the clothes and accessories for the upper-crust members of the household, providing a good spot for a valet or a lady's maid to retreat to discreetly. Also obviously, a massive kitchen is essential, plus a few dormitories for the staff, and I've included a seamstress's chamber and a florist's room too, but beyond that, I find myself putting in too many offices- only the heads of staff would be likely to have places like that, so I don't want more than a couple, and I'm stuck on this point as well!
Even if it'll be outrageously expensive (and lag-inducing) I'm having great fun designing this lot, so hopefully it'll give a few people out there inspiration, even if there's not many who are able to get much use from it directly! Any help on the designs at this point is absolutely welcomed!

I don't know if you have to replicate it that exactly. If you think it would look better with more ornate bedrooms than make them that way. You don't normally see a real building the way we look at sim buildings. With sim buildings you click up and down a level and you are looking at the lower level and the bedroom level within a few seconds, but in real life you would have to take a flight of stairs or a lift and it just isn't the same.

Do you have a servants wing? They could have there own kitchen, dining and living area. Does the main house have a gym,a games room and a music room? How about a party room or secret rooms using the mysterious bookcase. Special items like career rewards could be in the secret rooms.

One thing that I can think of is that the grander bedrooms would most likely have their own morning rooms/reception rooms, this could be a good way of using up the space. This would also give the aristocratic members of the household a private space of their own to accommodate and entertain their own guests. Also, have you thought much about bathrooms? The servants would have had a couple for each gender to use, but the Aristocratic family members wouldn't have had a designated bathroom, instead they would have had a free-standing tub in their bedrooms which would have been filled a bucket at a time by the servants, at least untill the end of the second world war when they would have lost almost all their servants and had to resort to installing a designated bathroom for themselves to use.

Do themed rooms. The Blue Room, the Green Room, the Red Room, the Elizabethan Room, the Georgian Room. Also, don't forget a large nursery with everything you need for the toddlers and kids so they don't have to be seen at all unless the grownups want them.

Since the number of games in which it will be the least bit playable will be small, you may as well go to town on it.

One possibility: build it as a community lot, or with the intention of showing the downstairs to create income and reserving the upstairs for family and the basement for servants. Because these houses are impossible to keep up in the modern economy if you don't use them to generate their own income!

OK, I'm done with at least my first pass at all the areas of the house that are going to be furnished (there's no indication anywhere I've found that the family would actually use the upper levels of the various towers, so they're mostly empty or used as "storage spaces"), and now I'm to the point of testing and revising things, just to make sure that none of my "creative" architectural detailings make the lot completely unplayable, even if it is solidly north of $1M! With a lot this large though, I wanted to inquire about any of the members who've been so helpful with this project thus far, who might be willing to test the lot themselves, to "proofread" it, if you will. (I'm sure I'd end up missing some detail that someone else would find.) I'd also just like feedback on the functionality of the lot- an aspect of the building that can be kind of tricky to get from a screenshot! Let me know if any of you would be willing to give the lot a good once-over, it'd be greatly appreciated!

I'd love to Zarathustra but I don't think my computer could handle it. My own play testing is going slowly on my current lot due to it's size, watching speed three move as slowly as speed one. I would hazard a guess this has way more walls than my subdivision. :/ Are you going to put up more pictures?

Yeah, though I'm not sure I'll have time for that until my weekend rolls around on Thursday and Friday... And it's definitely a big lot, no question about it, but I don't know that it's THAT much bigger than some of the other ones I've uploaded... My Westfall Kingdom and X-Men Mansion lots were probably both on about the same scale. Can't say I blame you if you don't want to sit through the time it'd take to process a lot like this, but if those other two lots worked, I think this one should too. (fingers crossed)

I'll also have to find a way to take pictures in the bedrooms... they're actually not all that big, there's just a ton of them! Looks like this building was designed with the idea that, aside from sleeping and being dressed in the mornings and evenings, you wouldn't have much cause to be in a bedroom- you were supposed to be in one of the ornate downstairs rooms with the other impeccably attired members of the household!

Well I can help with the picture thing, simply remove a wall with the wall tool, take your shot and click the undo arrow to replace it back. I do that for decorating contests all the time when a good view of awkward rooms are needed.

I should be able to test the lot for you. I just need to finish updating some outdated graphics drivers and I can give it a go for you and get back to you with feedback if you like?

You can use CFE to effect a crenelated edge to your roofs. I hope it's okay - I'm giving you a link to a tutorial I made for that...

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=526292

OK, so for those of you who feel your machines are equal to the task, here's the latest draft of my Downton/Highclere lot. I've tested it a little, but really only to check on the things that seemed like obvious candidates for big problems- I haven't actually gotten into the "practicality" aspects of playtesting yet. (The only real thing I've run into is the fact that the game doesn't like how I used the floor dividers in a lot of rooms, so they had to go. Bummer. ) Let me know any problems you run into, or any suggestions you have- if an object is inaccessible that doesn't seem like it should be... if a Sim has to be micromanaged into doing something that they should be able to do without such trouble... even if there's a room that you think would look better with a blue wallpaper instead of lavender! I'm open to whatever feedback I get... and for those of you whose machines AREN'T up to the task of a $1.1M lot, I'll still try to get screenshots up before too much longer.

What happened with the floor dividers? They normally only give trouble in apartments. I was bummed when I had to remove them too. Annoying game codes.



That's nice, I've done something like that before, only there is no matching fence top in sims 2 and no casT so it doesn't work quite as well.

*pops out of the woodwork*

If you don't mind, I'd gladly playtest this lot on my desktop later today. I'm not a builder and won't have anything constructive to add in those regards, but having my Sims poke around in such a gorgeous castle sounds like fun.

In this case, it was access to various items- fireplaces, chairs, and whatnot. Apparently Sims have no problem whatsoever WALKING across one of those dividers, but the herculean task of REACHING across one of them to touch something on the other side is beyond their capabilities! Stupid Sims. Basically, it just means that the dividers that outline the rugs on the first floor had to go... seems to have taken care of that particular problem.

And @SleepyTabby (and anyone else), by all means feel free to test it out- just let me know what you think/what problems you run into- no need to be a lot builder to find problems with a lot !

Ah that yes. I used a floor divider edge on some fire place floor tiles on my B&B and didn't think to play test it and found out later sims could not light the fire. Just when you think you made something look nice, the silly sims say you can't do it.

Testing Update.
I installed it and put it in a neighbourhood. It looked very impressive. But then I tried to load the lot. It took about half an hour before I had to give up trying. Given that the game itself loads up on my laptop within a matter of seconds, I'm going to have a poke about with my graphics card e.t.c. and see if I can get it to load the lot itself so I can give some better feedback on the lot. It does look so very grand and majestic in my neighbourhood/game though.

Okay I'll give it a go see if it will load for me.

Sadly, I couldn't get it to load, either. Tomorrow I'll try fiddling with the game settings to see if lowering them will help. I haven't tried loading it in build/buy mode, but live mode just doesn't seem to want to cooperate for me.

On the plus side, it's simply marvelous from map view.

It looks very nice and if testingcheats are on it throws up errors on the chimneys, I have GTX 660 and it lags it down so this is not for me.

I actually have run into the loading problem too, but it's one that I've run into so often that I didn't think to mention it! Assuming you're hitting the same issue I am, it'll just get stuck on the load screen, essentially crashing without actually pulling up a dialog box. If you go back and try to reenter the house from the neighborhood, (I think) you should see that it is occupied, and it should load properly the next go-round.

I'd just assumed the problem was my proclivity for making massive lots on an 8-year-old laptop... I'll have to check out that issue with the chimneys and see if I can address that- but if it's the saloon/library fireplace chimney, my own tests had it WORK fine, but if you try to do anything to it (pick it up, sledgehammer it, add another fireplace to the chimney), that makes the game lock up...

Hopefully I'll be able to figure out what's causing these problems, and get them addressed! Even if it's prohibitively large, so most people wouldn't PLAY it anyways, I don't want to upload something that's gonna cause people such trouble! Thanks everyone for your feedback so far, I welcome any other suggestions (if you're able to get into the lot, that is! )