Normandy House

Dio72 is a new range of diorama items that has just been released by Reality in Scale. For the moment the range covers buildings for all the major theatres of World War II.
This set represents a building that captures the looks and feel of Normandy, although I guess it could be used to represent a scene somewhere else in France as well.

The set contains 3 pieces, cast in grey resin, plus a decal poster and a piece of copper tubing, meant to be used for the small fountain. The decal, representing an advertisement for a well-known brand of tyres, will have to be cut in two to fit the wall. This means you can recover the other half for another project.

It seems Reality in Scale is using resin casting technology that is state of the art, as - even though the main part is a massive block - no warping is present on the parts, no air bubbles were found (on the backside) and detail is very crisp. Apart from removing a single casting block on the arched gate, there will be no clean-up required whatsoever, meaning that, after priming, painting can start straightaway.

The fountain needs to be glued against the main building, if you follow instructions. However, as the house has detail behind the location of the fountain, you are free to experiment with other position. Only the gate has detail on both sides, the others are solid, with a flat back. In our scale, diorama items that have detail on both sides are rather rare, with companies using open molds. Most of the time this results in a visible back-side of the walls, where the texture is rough and devoid of detail. Basically, this mean that you only get half a building and that you have to scratch the other side yourself. Dio72 has opted for another formula, where the building is solid, with a clean backside, making it ideal as a backdrop of a scene, without actually integrating the interior of the building in the scene.
Worthy of note is that the building is "cut" at a slight angle. As it needs to be put on the edge of a diorama (because it only has detail on three sides) this will add to dynamism of the scene.

All in all, a very nice set.

This is how I used the set (omitting some parts and adding a few others).

Sample kit kindly provided by Dio72

Article Last Updated:
19 May 2013
05 March 2019