Around the same time I started trying to win a large as my personal house in Final Fantasy XIV, Sekan did me a favour by trying to get one for our free company, too.
After I finally managed to win one for myself, I ended up taking over Operation Big FC House, but by that point, most of them were gone—and the ones that cropped up usually saw over a hundred entries.
So instead, I started looking for nicer mediums I could move us to. After all, as much as I like the Goblet and its swanky pool, it does sometimes meet with a little judgment as FFXIV’s least popular housing area.
It took about a year of that for us to finally land a beachfront spot in Shirogane—which meant it was time to tear down Chocobucks. And of course, if I’m going to rebuild, I might as well update a few things about the design, too!
Adapting an existing design
I’ve done this a few times lately, refining designs that I liked rather than coming up with something entirely new. With this build, it wasn’t actually so much for me as for my FC members, who liked the previous theme and didn’t know I moved the house. So you know, I couldn’t surprise them with too much all at once.
With this build, I wanted to keep the structure mostly the same, with a few notable changes where the previous windows, brick trim, and string lights were. The biggest change was that I wanted it to feel more modern overall, with new industrial elements in the shelving and high-class elements in the new wall textures.
I also brought back my design for wall-mounted flower pots, though this edition is a little different—I found with the previous one, the vases had to sit too far back into the wall to hide properly, so I doubled up on jars to bring the flowers out into the world.
Working with phasmascapes for windows
While I did this for my forest build, I had a little more wiggle room both in terms of item count and in space available. Because I was working with the limitations of a medium house for this build, I had to get a little creative in how I used phasmascapes—after all, I couldn’t spare a ton of walls and items to cover up the frames!
Though the main floor phasmascape windows were a little easier to use, the upstairs windows—which all use one phasmascape—are definitely a better example of how to work with them in limited space.
Building a custom coffee wall
My favourite part about design in Final Fantasy XIV is finding, ahem, unorthodox uses for furnishings. Very few things I build are actually what they’re supposed to be! Just look at the tables in this build, made of metal work lamps, dance poles, and consumed nameday cakes.
In this new version of the build, I ended up taking out most of the wood texture from the previous build, so I wanted to find a way to bring that warmth back a little bit. After a lot of fussing, I ended up with what I dubbed the coffee wall; a lovely modern design made up of all the colours of brewed coffee in the shape of its aromatic rising steam.
