More 20mm Eastern Front Buildings

Following on from my order from Lancer Miniatures I previously posted about, as mentioned I had ordered buildings from several other manufacturers as well, and my order from Area 9 arrived a couple of days after the Lancer one. Area 9 is a comparatively new manufacturer that’s started up in 2010 – in fact I only stumbled over them a couple of months ago thanks to a post on the Crisis In Alcovia blog earlier this year! They have some very nice looking stuff, and in the 20mm range I couldn’t resist ordering one each of their three buildings, and an assortment of wooden paling fences…

I ordered a full set of the available 20mm Russian/Eastern-Front Building range (although sans the matching bases) which consists of a Peasant Hut with Thatched Roof (P200), a longish Farm House with Wood Planked Roof (P201), another large Farm House with Corrugated Iron Roof & Veranda (P202), and a series of Wooden Paling Fence sections – there are 2 different 6″/15cm straight sections (P211), 2 different 4″/10cm straight sections (P212), and 2 different 4″/10cm gate sections (P213 – one with a double gate and one with a small single gate). There is also a good value combo-pack that gives you all 6 at a discounted price (P210) so I got one of these and an extra set of the 6″ long straights (P211) to fill it out. The fences are about 3cm high including their bases, so are about perfect for based 20mm figures (see photos – my Warmodelling & Elheim Russian figures pictured are mounted on 3mm MDF & Plywood bases for comparison). They are also “Corner-Less” – i.e. they are designed so you don’t need corner pieces – as each section has a large post at one end and none at the other – so you can place 1 section next to another as desired to create any angled corner you may want. And all three of the buildings feature lift of roofs so you can place troops inside and have textured detail on the interior floor and walls.

The buildings are shown here painted exactly as they arrived from Area 9, which is run by Neil Stiller. Area 9 also produces a lot of ‘generic’ terrain such as rocky ground and ready made hills, as well as a range of 15mm buildings for Eastern & Western Europe and the Mediterranean suitable for the Napoleonic era through to Modern times. The proprietor, Neil, is a qualified toolmaker who worked at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (including making model boat hull designs for the British Admiralty, which were used for tank tests conducted in the same Barnes Wallis tanks used to test the latter’s bouncing bombs), before moving on to a job doing Architectural modelling and scenery, then a management role at Games Workshop’s Eastwood facility, before freelancing doing more Architectural model making and scenery building. Neil tells me that in October 2010 he identified what he perceives as a lack of good 15mm scenery for wargamers in the UK, which lead to the establishment of Area 9, and subsequently expansion into 20mm scale buildings as well.

Neil believes his buildings are “are interesting, varied, and most of all have great playability; i.e. the figure bases fit inside, the windows are open for line of sight, the models are modular so you can constantly change your set up, and most importantly they are affordable“. In fact I am so impressed with these buildings I have ordered a second model of the farmhouse with corrugated iron roof & veranda (this time also including the matching base), and a swag more of the fencing – which is now already painted and winging its way to me from Neil as I post this! And I may subsequently get the bases for the Peasant Hut and the long Wooden Roofed Farmhouse (which I should have done originally). I have to say the P202 Farm House model really is especially wonderful (in my opinion) with it’s veranda and corrugated iron roof though – the detail of the iron is especially nice (have a close look at the front edge of it in the photos of the front of the building – it ‘looks’ so thin just like real corrugated iron), and if you buy the painted version Neil does a wonderful job of giving it that rusted iron look… Don’t forget as usual too, you can click on most of the images here to see larger versions if you’d like to see more detail…

I’ve also since had some more Eastern Front buildings arrive from Musket Miniatures in the USA that are very nice too (albeit a little smaller than the other manufacturers as they appear to truly be the HO 1/87th scale they claim – but they have lovely detail like Neil’s buildings above), however they are unpainted so I will add images of them once I get them painted (or at least base coated). Oh, and if you are wondering about the KV-2 in the photos it is from Easy Model’s Ground Armor Series (Model 36283), and was mail ordered from Japan for the princely sum of ¥450 – that was about NZ$7.50 – plus some postage!