I have been curious regarding MB's comment about a design flaw in the miniature of Collinwood found in the snow globe. Believing there is a flaw has somewhat dampened my enthusiasm, but I went ahead and ordered the snow globe for myself for Christmas as a gift from a family member. I have been pleased with the snow globe as I posted about in another thread, but there's still that nagging question of what's wrong with the Collinwood model.
I have spent several hours trying to discover what this might be and only now have returned to this thread to see that the flaw is visible, according to MB, in the picture of the snow globe on MPI's website. Well, you really can't see much detail in that picture, even when enlarged, so I am even more mystified, given my hours of studying photographs of Seaview Terrace that I've searched for online.
My search began with an aerial view of Seaview as found on Google maps. I had never really studied the layout of the house before, and though I've been there once, I hadn't really studied the house or its architecture. What I found from the aerial view is that the model in the snow globe is an accurate replica. I'm not saying that the model is going to hold to 100% accuracy especially if it were to be enlarged, but remember this is reducing an enormous mansion to a replica of only about 3 inches!
The first discrepancy I noted were the two trees - one in front of the tower at the back of the house, and one in the front near the circular drive. I also noticed that the driveway in the snowglobe had a slight variation, leaving off the actual entrance and instead accentuating what may actually be a sidewalk. Those things I could forgive for aesthetic reasons is there was some reason to change them. As far as the trees, I recall when I was there how bald that back yard was and thinking it could use some trees and shrubbery - it looked like Seaview could use a makeover from a landscaper. Then I found online in some older photographs that there have been trees near the tower in the past, so maybe the designer of the model was using older photographs. And perhaps even the route of the drive had changed over the decades. Another thing I noticed was that the porte-cochere on the miniature is filled in, as if it were a small add-on to the house. Again, I reasoned that given the vastly reduced nature of the miniature, it was easier to produce a solid extension of the building than an open porte-cochere. I mean, for $30 one can't expect a masterpiece of museum quality. I noticed that the tower in the back was somewhat overpowering, bigger than life. I compared views of the snowglobe at different angles with photographs I found online and found that, in real life, one wouldn't even see the top of the tower (which I identified as southwest) when looking from the opposite side of the house (in my estimation, the northeast). So the tower is larger than scale. A bit of a disappointment, but I would reason that the reason for them doing this is that the model would be so low and flat looking within the snowglobe - it already is, in keeping the square-footage area in proportion to the height of the building (as it appears to be, but I can't really say for sure).
Not every detail is depicted in the model and some are missing, but I have been very impressed overall. When I thought that various recessed areas were not evident, I found upon closer examination that those areas are actually recessed in the model, too. When I thought that the unfamiliar north end of the building didn't seem right, I found that it even had the right number of windows as seen in photographs. When I thought that the single-story area in the front courtyard to the left of the entrance couldn't be right (this is where I imagine that the study would have to be, where Grandma Collins lay in her coffin, and where Barnabas confronted Nathan Forbes, is a single-story area of the actual house (I don't remember seeing this at all when I was actually at Seaview Terrace).
I next found photographs of a 3' by 4' scale model of Collinwood produced in great detail by Korova Art and compared especially some of less familiar sides and views of the building's exterior, especially that northeast corner, which for some reason I had found rather unimpressive in real life. This may be the area I read about where an earlier mansion had actually stood, vestiges of which were incorporated in this north wing of the house - something else I had never known about. And the snow globe model depicts all of these areas accurately with one obvious omission, which is the lack of a fireplace on that end of the building in the miniature.
So, even upon close inspection, I have been unable to identify the glaring design flaw when should have perhaps ruined my enjoyment of the snow globe. Perhaps it is something to do with the architecture of the tower, as that is probably the most prominent aspect of the house that is visible in the MPI photograph. Besides it being too big, perhaps it is not accurate in terms of the French Romanesque style - I haven't studied that yet and will leave it to those better versed in architectural design, which I believe MB is!
To complete my observations of the globe part of the snow globe, what I thought was green snow is actually the usual white fluff one finds in snow globes. There isn't a lot of it and it seems to fall into some sort of crevice about the edges of the miniature yard. But when you shake the snow globe, in addition to the snow there is also something like glitter. These may be tiny plastic pieces that seem to actually be a pinkish color but appear to reflect green from the bright green grass of the yard. That does give a somewhat eerie quality, rather interesting in that the green tinge apparently is a reflection from the golf-course green grass around Collinwood (which is a bit too bright and green for my taste).
-Phillippe
