Chisel & Mouse

Home
Chisel & Mouse

Call Website Contact the business

handmade models • architectural sculptures • 3d cityscape maps • bespoke pieces • lobby art • visual merchandising props

We want to make and sell beautiful models of cool architecture.

30/10/2026

Empire State

From the start of demolition on the old Waldorf-Astoria to opening day, the Empire State Building took about thirteen months.

William F. Lamb of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon designed it, reportedly working through sixteen massing studies, for financier John J. Raskob, who was determined to outdo Walter Chrysler's tower. Up to 3,400 workers a day raised the steel at roughly four and a half storeys a week, and when it opened on 1 May 1931 it stood 1,250 feet to the roof across 102 storeys — the world's tallest building until 1970. Its stepped silhouette was partly a legal requirement, thanks to New York's 1916 zoning law.

Lamb added one more ambitious touch: a mooring mast, meant to let airships dock at the top. It never worked in practice, defeated by updrafts around the tower, but it survives as the famous spire. The early years were hard too — in the Depression much of the building stood empty, earning it the nickname the "Empty State Building".

Our model captures the Fifth Avenue entrance — the columned doorway at the foot of the tower, rather than the tower itself.

🔗 Link in bio.

26/10/2026

Daily News Building

This is the building that played the Daily Planet in the 1978 film Superman.

Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells designed it in 1930 as the headquarters of the New York Daily News, at 220 East 42nd Street. After the Gothic of his Tribune Tower, Hood went radically plain: bold vertical stripes of white brick running the full height with no ornamental crown, a block away from the Chrysler Building. The New York Times thought the white piers looked like tall piles of newspapers.

Hood had only a modest budget for the entrance and lobby, so he spent it all in one place. Above the 42nd Street doorway is a three-storey limestone bas-relief by René Chambellan, showing New York's workers beneath a skyline and captioned with a line attributed to Lincoln. Inside, a rotunda under a black glass dome holds a 12-foot globe that has been slowly turning since 1930.

Our model captures the 42nd Street entrance — the granite base and Chambellan's sweeping bas-relief.

🔗 Link in bio.

23/10/2026

Firestone Building

It was demolished over a single Bank Holiday weekend in 1980, just before it could be legally protected.

Designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners — reportedly in just three weeks — and completed in 1928–29, the Firestone Building was the gleaming white face of Brentford's Great West Road, the "Golden Mile" of Art Deco factories. Its faience-tiled front was conceived around the form of an Egyptian temple, with a stepped central tower, a pediment, tall pillars and bronze lamp standards.

The factory closed in February 1980 and the site was sold to the developer Trafalgar House. A government inspector had already recommended emergency listing, but no senior civil servant could be found to sign before the Bank Holiday began. On Saturday 23 August, demolition crews destroyed the entrance tiles, pillars, pediment and lamp standards. The outcry became the first major campaign for the Thirties Society, and within a year some 150 interwar buildings had been recommended for listing. Only the gates, piers and railings survive, now Grade II listed.

Our model, made from historic photographs, captures the central entrance bay — the stepped tower, pediment and flanking pillars.

🔗 Link in bio.

19/10/2026

Carreras Black Cat Factory

For its opening in 1928, the pavements outside the Carreras Black Cat Factory were covered in sand.

Actors in ancient Egyptian costume performed alongside cast members from Verdi's Aida, and the building behind them was every bit as theatrical. The theme rode the wave of Egyptomania that followed the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Designed by Collins, Collins & Porri, the 550-foot factory on Hampstead Road in Camden was the largest reinforced-concrete factory in Britain at the time. Guarding the entrance are two bronze statues of Bastet, the Egyptian cat-goddess, each eight and a half feet tall — a nod to the Black Cat cigarette brand, which began with a black cat that took to sleeping in a shop window.

The cats haven't always been there. When production ended in 1959 and the building became offices, most of the Egyptian ornament was stripped away, the statues included. A restoration in the late 1990s recovered most of the lost detail and installed new bronze casts. Now known as Greater London House, the building is Grade II listed.

Our model captures the central entrance bay — the two cats, the papyrus-form columns and the Egyptian detailing — rather than the full 550-foot frontage.

🔗 Link in bio.

16/10/2026

Plymouth Hotel

Anton Skislewicz trained as a naval engineer long before he designed a hotel.

Born in Croatia, he studied in Vienna, worked for shipbuilders in Oslo and designed ship machinery in Brooklyn before taking an architecture degree at Columbia. In 1940 he completed the Plymouth on 21st Street in Miami Beach, and the engineer's boldness shows: a tall corner pylon rising above the roofline, inspired by the towers of the 1939 New York World's Fair, set against narrow vertical slits, horizontal banding and projecting window eyebrows.

The building has had several lives. It housed GIs during the Second World War, then from 1987 until around 2013 it was a dormitory for young musicians of the New World Symphony. During a restoration, twin lobby murals by the Russian-born artist Ramon Chatov were discovered hidden beneath later renovations, and their jewel-toned colours went on to shape the interiors when the Plymouth reopened as a boutique hotel in 2017.

Our model captures the 21st Street entrance façade — the corner pylon, the vertical slits and the horizontal banding.

🔗 Link in bio.

12/10/2026

Marlin Hotel

Behind the Art Deco façade of this 1939 hotel, a recording studio once drew artists including Aerosmith, U2, Jay-Z and Mick Jagger to South Beach.

L. Murray Dixon designed the Marlin at 1200 Collins Avenue. He was the most prolific architect in Miami Beach — around 42 hotels in the Art Deco District alone, and, with Henry Hohauser, responsible for roughly 70 per cent of its buildings. Dixon's signature was the curve, and it's all here: rounded corners that wrap the eye around the building, horizontal banding at every floor, window eyebrows that shade the glass from the Florida sun, and a vertical fin above the parapet.

In 1988 Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records — the label that signed Bob Marley and U2 — bought the Marlin. He reopened it as a hotel in 1991 with a studio on the ground floor and interiors by Barbara Hulanicki, the founder of London's legendary fashion store Biba. For a while it was the unofficial headquarters of South Beach's cultural comeback.

Our model captures the Collins Avenue façade — the horizontal banding, rounded corners, window eyebrows and vertical fin.

🔗 Link in bio.

09/10/2026

Century Hotel

On a street where hotels climbed to five or six storeys, the Century stayed at two and competed on elegance instead.

Henry Hohauser designed this 26-room Streamline Moderne hotel in 1939, at the quiet southern end of Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. Its inspiration was the ocean liner: a striped mast rises from the centre of a symmetrical white façade, and circular portholes repeat in the street-level balustrade, the upper corners and the lobby doors. Hohauser was working to middle-class budgets, so a handful of clear ideas did all the work.

The whole street nearly didn't survive. By the 1970s Ocean Drive's hotels were run down, the area was nicknamed "God's Waiting Room", and developers wanted to replace them with high-rises. Barbara Baer Capitman, a former journalist with no architectural training, co-founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and spent years fighting to save them. In 1979 the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first urban 20th-century historic district in America to be.

Our model captures the Ocean Drive façade — the striped central mast, the stepped parapet and the porthole motifs.

🔗 Link in bio.

20/07/2026

Craven Cottage

It's the oldest football stand still in use in professional English football — and it's been standing on the same site since 1905.

The Johnny Haynes Stand at Craven Cottage was built by Archibald Leitch, the Scottish engineer who shaped the physical form of British football more than any other individual — Ibrox, Goodison, Anfield, Old Trafford, Highbury, and dozens more grounds all carry his design language. At Craven Cottage that language survives almost untouched: red brick, decorative gables, a strict symmetrical composition anchored on a central bay. Grade II listed since 1987, it has seen every Fulham home match for well over a century, in a sport that has otherwise demolished and rebuilt at pace since the Taylor Report.

The ground itself is unlike anywhere else in the Premier League — tucked into a bend of the Thames beside Bishops Park, with no ring roads or car parks, just a walk through the trees to reach it. Fulham's new Riverside Stand, completed in 2025 by Populous, now faces Leitch's brick façade directly across the pitch — a deliberate, honest contrast between Edwardian craft and twenty-first-century engineering.

Our model captures the Johnny Haynes Stand's Stevenage Road façade — the face Craven Cottage shows to the street.

🔗 Link in bio.

17/07/2026

Arsenal Stadium

Most football grounds of the 1930s were purely functional. This one was built to look like a civic institution — and it worked.

Arsenal moved to Highbury in 1913, with Archibald Leitch's typically functional stands. But the ground's defining character came in the 1930s rebuild: Claude Waterlow Ferrier and William Binnie's West Stand in 1932, then the matching East Stand in 1936, both in a restrained Art Deco language of symmetry, proportion, and simplified classical detailing. The East Stand's Avenell Road façade — thirteen bays stepping up to a central entrance porch with a moulded black marble surround — reads more like a cinema or town hall of the period than a sports venue.

Arsenal played their last match at Highbury in 2006 before moving to the Emirates. Rather than being demolished, the Grade II listed East and West Stand façades were preserved and folded into a residential development, Highbury Square, with the old pitch reborn as a communal garden — one of English football's more sensitively handled adaptive reuse projects.

Our model captures that East Stand façade on Avenell Road — the face Highbury showed to the city.

🔗 Link in bio.

10/07/2026

Old Yankee Stadium

It was the first ballpark in America ever called a "stadium." The name was deliberate, and it stuck for 85 years.

When the original Yankee Stadium opened on 18 April 1923, it was the largest sports venue in the country — a three-decked concrete colossus in the Bronx, built in under a year after Babe Ruth's arrival made the Yankees too big for their old ground at the Polo Grounds. Ruth marked the opening with a home run in the third inning. Sportswriter Fred Lieb called it "The House That Ruth Built" before the day was out, and the name outlived the building itself.

Eighty-five years followed: Lou Gehrig's farewell speech in 1939, Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956, 26 World Series championships — more than any other ballpark in the sport's history. The stadium was substantially rebuilt inside its own walls in 1974–76, then closed for good in 2008 and demolished in 2010–11. The site is now a public park, its diamonds laid out so home plate roughly overlaps the one the Yankees played on for eight and a half decades.

Our model captures the main entrance on East 161st Street — the threshold 60,000 fans crossed every game, not the famous copper frieze most people picture first.

🔗 Link in bio.

Address

Telephone

+441273210335

Website

http://chiselandmouse.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Chisel & Mouse posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Chisel & Mouse:

Want your business to be the top-listed interior service?

Country:

City: