It’s been a hot minute since I did any design builds in FFXIV, and as much as I missed creating like this, that was for a few reasons.
First up, as you might have seen around the blog, things are looking a little different. I’ve been working on a redesign, and though I have most of the new formats laid out, design posts were the one I hadn’t quite figured out yet simply because of how I had them set up before. It’s hard to get yourself to do something if you’re not happy with it yet!
And second, I never really came back to this topic after my ill-fated lottery attempt last April, but suffice it to say that I entered nearly every lottery after that first one when Empyreum came out and lost every single one. It actually got pretty disheartening after a while, but well, that’s just the luck of the draw.
Last week, though, things took a turn. Despite my inability to believe my own eyes at the time, I ended up winning a large!
It was a little bittersweet to leave my medium in the Mist behind–I originally bought that home back in early 2018, when players were scarce and free plots were plentiful, and managed to grind up for weeks to earn the gil for it. I had five years of fun designing that home on the cliff, and though it was sad to move, increased item slots and much higher ceilings awaited me.
Obviously, the first thing I did was build in it!
Working with higher ceilings
One of the main reasons why I wanted a large home originally was for the atrium. When you’re building with multiple floors, it doesn’t take long to max out your height in a medium home–if you look back at some of my multi-floor designs, you’ll notice they stack additional floors off to the side and not fully above the main floor.
That happens for a combination of reasons:
- If your second floor is up too high, ceilings you make out of rugs will snap up to the next floor
- If you’re using any camera blockers like riviera beds, there just isn’t enough space for a comfortable second floor above
With the atrium, you have the flexibility of both floors plus the space in between to build up–which makes it much more feasible to do a traditional two-storey build.
This particular design, though it still doesn’t fully stack the rooms because of the barrier I accidentally created with the fireplace, does get a full-sized staircase with the sense of a room actually being on the second storey, and I love every bit of it.
Designing for clutter
Homes in FFXIV are notoriously limiting in terms of item slots, and realistically, 400 slots for a house of this size are still pretty tight. But when you’re building in a limited space like the atrium, those extra slots can afford enough room for something I sometimes had to forgo in some of my more complicated builds:
Clutter.
I don’t love super minimalist builds as a rule because they so often look impossibly un-lived in. I know my house has never looked like that, and probably never will. So I always like when I can add little details that make a build feel more like a home, and I was really happy to be able to do that with this design.
I actually have about 20 slots left over, so I still have room to add some clutter if I want to. But I think I’ll take the realistic approach and have it slowly build up over time!
Creating from inspiration
I’ve always been one of those people who likes to create from an image, whether it’s one that exists physically or one I hold in my mind. And lately, I’ve been getting a lot of inspiration from real-life homes I find on Pinterest.
This build actually came from one such source, and all in all, I’m really happy with how it came together. The parts I really wanted to bring across were the natural lighting, the sheer scale of the fireplace, and the dreamy comfort of the massive sectional. The layered cushions were a pretty fun project, too–especially because they struggled to float and needed a rug to attach themselves to.
