Welcome @ 6354 Blue Lakes!
This is a design project presented to PMC Interior Decorators Minecraft Detail Contest June 2020.
This is an interior design based on Aequotis' starter map The Blue Lakes.
It is fully build, block by block in vanilla Minecraft 1.15. without any further tools or aids than the native MC.
All thanks for the generous donation go to the jury:
It is my first decoration design project and the map was highly inspiring to me. To make it more fun, I added some story to it and a basic in-game documentation on the builder decisions, mechanisms and technical detail.
I have lived now in more than 30 estates, from small flats to castles, and travelled in all types of tourist accomodations, starting from upper 5-star hotels to bed-and-breakfasts. These RL experience with those "housings" have taught me a few design principles which I wanted to translate into the virtual environment of MC.
1. Houses of have a story. They never end up as they were originally designed. This is even true for very new, standard urbanization building. To give this "touch of personnality" is necesarry to make something alive.
2. Modern design. This is a large concept and I wanted to stand apart from the standard upper class IKEA style of so many reform TV shows. This is how my idea of"reforming a historical building" came about.
3. Design and function. In other fields of design, it is well known that design and function are completly interdependent. You cannot develop one without the other. I found out that it's no difference here. A central question was to define what this house should be for. There is hughe difference between designing it as a hotel, a yoga retreat, an shared home for adults, or a family estate with kids. You could desing a 3 store building with one toilette on the base floor, for example. But do you imagine to go every time you have neccesity down the stair 2 floors?
4. Minecraft design. Minecraft could be an interesting tool for desing urban planning or architecture, as done by the UN Block by Block project. Another approach, would be to design a building to create a virtual life experience according to the Minecraft logic.
When designing the rooms, I always had in mind that it should work in survival modus, for example as a Spawn area.
Therefore, this design proposal includes a End portal and an enchanting room. (There is no Nether portal, with the hope, that some neigbour will have one. I simply didn't find the right place for it). Further, I filled the cupboards around an area with some tools that might be needed or broken and rebuilt in survival mode. This way, preparing the map for a future project to create an advanture for it.
5. MC mechanism. This map should be functional for import and export, as well as reassembling in a larger map with other buildings. For this reason, mechanisms had to be very clean and as small as possible. Yet, some funny and also practical mechanisms were applied here.
I built a garage door, foremost because I got bored of running always around. Actually, I made to designs of this house. In a first design, I made a piston sandstone door. It differed from the wooden aspect in the outside, but besides a 5 block wide sand door in the garage, you could absolutly not see anything from the inside. Since the outside aspect of the building was condition, I had to change the mechanism to this one, which so far found no solution for a working aesthetics in the inside.
6. Fireplaces. Fireplaces are also a very functional part and all this flickering of fires and smoking of fireplaces makes the place alive. I wanted to include a fireplace under the chimeney to make it smoke as well, but it require either a 3 block large chimney, which was an unallowed modification of the outside structure, or an active command block in the roofing, which according to my understanding would not work in this project.
7. Hidden rooms. I think hidden rooms are so much of the MClogic. But not only, in some of the estates, I had lived, there were RL hidden rooms, especially inside the roofing, passing through wardrobes (it really exists!), cellars and partial mezzanines. I could not apply any of these concepts, since I required all the space for other functions. But, MC has something to offer RL can't...
- walking through paintings. I really love this concept!
- piston doorways. This seems less common in RL than Indiana Jones movies make us think.
8. Furniture design. There is some furniture design with coloured coushions, lamps, beds, tables, sittable chairs and sofa areas.
9. Facilities. Most of the facilities are working, such as fridge, oven, showers.
10. Garden design. There is a quite detaild pond terraforming, and I tried to make most realistic trees.
There is a small blog with further details on the design project: https://the-blue-lakes.blogspot.com/
I hope, you like my interpretation of The Blue Lakes and download the map. Please, try it out, walk through it.
Open the cupboards and try to imagine some event such as a birthday party in it.
I hope you enjoy it!
Dora Pan
