In my constant search for reasonably priced yet attractive buildings I bought a couple
of these Italeri Berlin House kits some time ago. Like these things usually go, they lingered in storage
for quite a while before I got around to actually building and painting them.
First Impressions
The kits are sturdy injection molded plastic, these are hefty enough to handle gaming use unlike some other kits. On the other hand, there are absolutely no extra parts, even doors are not included. You get walls and floors and that's it.
The basic house kit consists of a ground floor, an upper story and a roof piece. The extension kit consists of just the upper story parts, identical to the house kit. You can assemble the house with as many upper stories as you like, including none. The basic footprint of the house is roughly square, a little over 20cm per side.
Interior walls are provided for all the floors, dividing the floor into central stairwell and four rooms of roughly equal size. If you want to omit some of the interior walls, you will have some filling to do as all the parts slot into grooves.
While nominally 1/72 scale, the house fits 28mm figures just fine. They won't be able to actually fit through the interior doors, but they don't look too much off.
The exterior surfaces are very nicely detailed, the interior walls are smooth but serviceable but the
interior sides of the main walls are just hideous. They are full of casting artefacts and virtually
no thought has been given to their appearance from inside the building. To add insult to injury, their
design makes it very hard to resurface them.
In Use
The kit is pretty easy to assemble, the central stairwell being the fiddliest bit. Otherwise the pieces are very large and go together nicely without much fuss. If you don't want to use the interior, you can do some serious shortcuts as the interior walls are not essential to the model's integrity.
Just paint the interior black and glue everything together.
The amount of work needed in the assembly largely depends on how fussy you are about how the interior looks. I cleaned casting artefacts off the wall pieces and covered the most offensive bits with plasticard and putty and sanded the smooth walls to give them some texture.
But I made a mistake I soon discovered when I started painting: This kit will be substantially easier
to paint unassembled. If I get another, I will definitely paint the parts separately before sticking
them together.
Otherwise painting is pretty straightforward, and again the amount of work needed depends on what you want from the kit. It will look perfectly fine with just a gray drybrush, but there is quite a lot of detail on the exterior walls. Even simply picking it out in a single color will take considerable time.
If you decide to paint the details, do yourself a favor and go for good contrast. I used the same detail color on all my pieces, but it's clearly visibly only on the floor with red walls. Subtle differences is shades of gray are easily lost at distances buildings are usually viewed at.
Verdict
These kits are somewhat old and while availability is still okay, prices can vary quite a bit. You
should be able to find the basic kit for around 30 euros, but postage may add a bundle as it's
pretty heavy. Typically the extension kit costs roughly half of the full house kit's price. Considering
that you get three floors in the full house kit vs. just one in the extension, the full kit is
generally the better deal unless you are specifically looking to build very tall buildings.
Unless you don't care about what the interior looks like, there is quite a lot of work to put this kit into presentable shape. On the other hand, the exterior has very nice three dimensional detail to it that laser-cut MDF kits have a hard time matching.
The kit should be considered a rough basis for a building, to be finished with extra parts. But on the other hand there are really aren't any alternatives of similar size and exterior detail for this price.
You get what you pay for. Maybe I should get a couple more...
maxxon
Sucks!
