Word spread, and pretty soon people were asking Pesce to make models of their children’s houses, their friends’ houses or the houses they were moving from.
He’s built a couple of hundred over the years, he figures. Many are created as gifts. Some are commissioned.
Pesce’s houses are usually built from card stock, cardboard or foam core and held together with Elmer’s glue and occasionally dowels, if more reinforcement is needed. They’re all built to scale, ranging from 1 inch per foot — dollhouse size — to a teeny one-sixteenth per foot, which produces a house appropriate for a Christmas ornament. Some of the houses are designed to be lighted from the inside by a battery-operated tea light.
The houses are an extension of Pesce’s architectural and fine art training and his many years of interior design work at the former Marvin Interiors. His goal as an interior designer was always to create functional spaces that fit his clients’ wishes and lifestyles, he said. In a way, that’s what he’s doing in miniature.
But with the model houses, “in most cases, I have all the control,” he said. Even when he creates a replica of a real house, it’s still an artistic interpretation rather than an exact rendition, he said.
