Just down the road from Berthiaume Manor is Barnavelt House. I based it on an Italianate Victorian I saw in a magazine, Cronin House in Marshall, Michigan. The cool thing is that when I googled that house, I found out it had been the one that inspired children’s author John Bellairs when he wrote The House with a Clock in its Walls. I remember the Bellairs books fondly from my childhood, so I named my Sims 2 house after the main character, Lewis Barnavelt.

As I was creating the house, I thought it might look good sort of run-down and haunted, so I tried to make the wallpaper look disheveled (which isn’t easy given the wallpapers in Sims 2) and put “weeds” (really just bamboo trees) in the front yard. I actually like the floor plan (although I wish we had spiral stairs so the tower would be accessible), so I might have one of my families move in at some point and “remodel”. :-)