This week, I wanted to showcase one of the more detailed builds from the designer Ashen Bride. Ashen is pretty well known in the FFXIV housing community for her minimalistic designs and creative solutions as well as hosting the HGXIV podcast. For this segment, I’d like to show off one of my favorite designs she has created: the RPG shop.
Nestled into a corner of the Goblet on the Famfrit server, this small home was designed more specifically for her FC and concentrates all of the details on the main floor, blocking off the basement. Though it is snug, it feels like stepping into an entirely different game with the insane level of detail and unorthodox placement of furniture.
The first thing you’ll notice upon entering the shop is probably the walls. All of the walls have been covered up with partitions, to give the interior a smooth finish. While you can’t display any patterns this way, it does end up giving a nice, uniform appearance.
The downside to using partitions is that they can end up taking away a lot of slots from your item placement limit. This is one of the reasons I suspect that the design is exclusive to the first floor. But, partitions are extremely versatile, easy to blend together, and can be combined with a variety of other items like the manor counter to craft a lovely trim.
Additionally, the ceilings have also been covered up with flooring mats, to get rid of the default Goblet design. While there isn’t anything particularly wrong with the Goblet ceiling, you can’t customize its color or design at all, but you can dye the flooring mats. Using a floating glitch, you can then line these mats in a way to cover the default ceiling and create your own.
Ashen is incredibly talented when it comes to her attention to detail and use of lighting. At the far end of the shop, you can see a gorgeous bay window with mannequins displaying adventuring gear. During the day, this bay window bathes the room in a lovely natural light, helping to open up the otherwise cramped space. Shuttered windows turned backwards also light up the merchant space behind the counter as well as the fake ceiling. At nighttime, these windows dim, but there are plenty of lanterns spread around the shop that keep that same level of lighting without looking garish or out of place. There’s just a wonderful synergy about the shop that feels authentic, and like you really could walk in and purchase just about anything you’d need for a long journey across Eorzea.
It’s a small detail to mention, but it’s one of my favorites in the shop; a beautiful vase of red flowers sits in the center of the room amidst a few crates and barrels. Maybe it’s the contrast between the forest green of the walls and the red petals, but it’s just such a beautiful centerpiece that adds a satisfying pop of color to the scene. Furthermore, the potion racks on the wall also add a nice variety of colors to the walls that help draw the eye to nearby shelves and products for sale.
The sale counter with boxes was actually constructed out of merchant shelves that were sunken into the floor. Since they would have glitched through the basement’s ceiling, this is another reason that you might wish to seal off your bottom floor. You don’t have to use every floor of your home, especially if you have a larger home and find it intimidating. You can just block it off with partitions and voila!
I have so much love and admiration for this build. I like to decorate, but I don’t have an eye for the finer details like the HGXIV cast does. Everything they build just feels realistic and meaningful, or like it’s something out of a home design catalogue. The amount of talent these folks have is incredible, and they’re often kind enough to show you how they do it on their Youtube channel. If you’d like to keep up with their updates and newest builds, you can find them on Youtube and Twitter.
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