Veteran marketing executive Lisa Macpherson was thrilled two years ago, when she and her boyfriend Jim decided to buy their first house together, in Virginia. The only sacrifice: He would no longer live full-time in his house in Chicago, a passion project on which he’d collaborated closely with an architect.
The solution, Macpherson reasoned, was for him to bring that house to Virginia with him—at least a scale model of it. Macpherson found a U.K.-based model maker, Chisel & Mouse, to tackle the project. She sent across blueprints, satellite images, photographs, and other details about Jim’s home, and connected the firm with his architect in case of questions.
“For someone in love with their home, seeing it reproduced at scale, with every detail perfect—it would be a knockout gift,” Macpherson explains via telephone from Virginia. “It was the perfect intersection of where we were in our relationship and his passion for that house.”
Sure enough, a few months later, an enormous wooden crate arrived in Virginia. At its center, painstakingly packed, was a 14-inch-wide plaster replica of Jim’s home in Illinois. The maquette perfectly mirrored every exterior detail; elements of the interior were visible, too. Through one window, Macpherson could see the fireplace; another provided a view of Jim’s platform bed. When Macpherson presented it to him at Christmas, Jim was speechless.
“Even a couple of years later, it’s still a big darn deal,” she says with pride. “It’s on a glass cocktail table here in Virginia—it’s the centerpiece of the room.”
Custom miniatures are increasingly the focus of Chisel & Mouse, which Robert Paisley runs with his brother, Gavin. The duo, yearning for a more fulfilling career after working in software sales and banking, turned to model making seven years ago.
“We’re both passionate about architecture,” Robert explains from their studio just outside Brighton, England. “And Gavin’s pride and joy is a Millennium Falcon in Lego, and he loves anything Airfix.”
The Paisleys combined these interests by buying an early Makerbot 3D printer with which they developed molds of such noteworthy buildings in the U.K. as the Tate Modern and the Battersea Power Station. The pair then hand-poured plaster into those molds before custom-finishing each piece. The results were an instant hit with the likes of interior design guru Sheridan Coakley of furniture design company SCP; the range of works now includes everything from the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, Calif., to a Regency townhouse in Bath, England, and aerial views, incuding cityscapes of London, Chicago, and other places, that can be hung like paintings.
Soon after launching the firm, the Paisleys began receiving enquiries such as the one from Macpherson: Could Chisel & Mouse apply its model-making know-how on a bespoke basis? In response, the brothers created a custom division that produces made-to-order maquettes such as that of Jim’s house in Chicago. Bespoke models take around 12 weeks and cost from 1,500 pounds ($2,117) to 5,000 pounds; tbespoke projects now make up about 40 percent of their business.
“We’ve always been approached by people who have buildings that are fabulous, and it’s an incredibly joyous experience when they get to open the finished product,” Paisley says. “Everybody has been over the moon.”