Toffle Towers: designing a hotel exterior

Many scenes in the Toffle Towers series happen in and around the eponymous hotel. So it was down to me – an illustrator with absolutely no architecture experience (!) – to design the exterior of the building. It needed to look historic, a little shabby but also exciting and quirky. Here’s how I designed it.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Toffle Towers book 3, I’ve prepped a bunch of behind-the-scenes blog posts. I’ll show you how I designed the characters; how I designed the cover for book 1; how I designed the hotel’s lobby; and how I designed other elements like the shuttle bus and the title typography. But today, I’m showing you how I designed the exterior of the hotel.

Tim described the hotel pretty clearly; it had three floors and a symmetrical design. It had ivy growing up the walls, and it also sounded a bit old-fashioned and quirky. This is the very first tiny scrappy sketch I made while reading the book.

Through some google image searching, I found a real location that felt like what I had in mind: Belton House in the UK. The problem was, it only had two floors. So I photoshopped another one on (and added in some extra turrets).

From there I could have a go at drawing it and simplifying it. I tried one version that was pretty much the same dimensions … … but it wasn’t quite quirky enough, so I smooshed it – I made it narrower and taller. It still wasn’t quite quirky enough, so I mucked around some more, and started adding some colour – I made three more versions.

Here’s a timelapse of me sketching those three versions.

Version B was the winner! Here’s the final version (before Barry started renovating it).

You can check out more behind-the-scenes blog posts for Toffle Towers here.

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Toffle Towers 3: Order in the Court

Pre-order now:
– Booktopia (Australia/NZ only)
– Dymocks
– QBD (Australia only)
– Readings
– Angus & Robertson (Australia only)
– Book Depository

Toffle Towers 2: The Great River Race

Buy online
– Booktopia (Australia/NZ only)
– Dymocks
– QBD (Australia only)
– Readings
– Angus & Robertson (Australia only)

Toffle Towers 1: Fully Booked

Buy online
– Booktopia (Australia/NZ only)
– Kinokuniya (Australia only)
– Dymocks
– QBD (Australia only)
– Readings
– Angus & Robertson (Australia only)