For fifty years, the Lansdown Arts studio has accumulated a remarkable working archive of miniature architectural carvings and castings. Preserved in plaster and resin, these fragments record the development of Eric Lansdown’s dollhouses, aviaries and architectural worlds, together with the hands, ideas and experiments behind them.

The Architectural Archive brings selected fragments together as framed wall panels. Columns, portals, staircases, tracery and ornamental façades are arranged against woven hessian, transforming the working materials of the studio into compositions that reveal the craft behind its finished worlds.

A Collection Begun by Carole Lansdown

The Casting Panels began with Eric’s mother, Carole Lansdown. Although she worked professionally as a decorative painter, Carole was also a prolific creator, builder and designer whose classical taste helped shape the visual language of Lansdown Arts.

Carole travelled widely each year with fellow artists. During a visit to London, she discovered Sir John Soane’s Museum, where plaster casts, architectural fragments, antiquities, models and paintings are assembled throughout the architect’s former home. She returned inspired to explore variations on this approach using castings from Eric’s studio.

The casting process naturally produced extras, trials and imperfect seconds. Carole collected these fragments and experimented with their arrangement, transforming materials left over from the making process into compositions of their own.

Rather than concealing the process of making, she gave its remnants a new life. Tests, variations and imperfect castings became records of invention, capable of carrying the studio’s history beyond the works for which they were originally created.

The style and principle she established continue today. As Eric creates new carvings, their castings enter the studio’s working library and may eventually become part of future panels. The Architectural Archive therefore continues to grow alongside the practice it records.

Carved by Hand

The panels are playful arrangements of classical decorative and architectural elements. Before becoming castings, each form begins as a miniature wood carving, shaped by Eric using exceptionally small chisels.

Some of these tools were inherited from Eric’s great-aunt, Edith Hamlin, a San Francisco muralist and mosaic artist. Lansdown family history records that Hamlin and her husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, used the chisels to carve frames for their paintings. In Eric’s hands, the same tools became part of a new architectural language in miniature.

Once carved, the original forms are moulded and cast in plaster or resin. Individual elements can then return in different works and arrangements, gradually forming an architectural vocabulary developed across fifty years of practice.

Gothic tracery may appear beside classical portals, Baroque ornament, carved staircases or imagined façades. Each composition draws from this evolving library while establishing its own rhythm, character and relationship between forms.

A Family Practice

Carole developed many of the painted patterns, finishes and decorative themes that appeared across Eric’s dollhouses and aviaries. Their collaboration established a family dynamic that remained central to the studio from its beginning, with different generations contributing their skills to a shared body of work.

In her later years, Carole continued this work of preservation by assembling extensive records of the studio’s dollhouses, aviaries, sketches, blueprints, publications and workshop photography. Selected materials from these records will soon be presented through the forthcoming Lansdown Arts Visual Archive.

The Casting Panels belong to this same instinct to collect and preserve. They record not only what the studio made, but also the experiments, tools and relationships through which the work came into being.

From San Francisco to Gabian

Eric’s work first attracted wider attention in 1979, when a journalist discovered his dollhouse studio aboard a thirty-metre tuna boat moored at Pier 42 in San Francisco’s Tugboat Alley. Eric had rescued the vessel from the bottom of the bay and transformed it into a working studio.

That waterfront world has since disappeared, but the practice continues. Today, Eric works from a thousand-year-old fortified building overlooking the Thongue in Gabian, Occitanie, in southern France.

The working archive spans that journey. Its castings connect the floating San Francisco studio in which Eric’s career began with the workshop in France where his skills are now being passed forward.

A Craft Passed Forward

Today, the archive has acquired another purpose.

Lansdown Arts is becoming a place where emerging artists can learn through proximity: observing, attempting and gradually mastering techniques developed over a lifetime. The carvings and moulds are not being preserved as untouchable relics. They remain part of a living studio: used, studied and passed from master to apprentice.

Each apprentice is given authorship over the composition of a single panel, selecting and arranging castings taken from carvings developed and perfected over fifty years of Eric’s practice. Their arrangement reflects an understanding of the master’s visual language while adding their own judgement, taste and hand to its continuation. The result brings the mastery of one lifetime into conversation with the emerging voice of the next.

By opening this working library to a new generation, Eric is ensuring that the knowledge contained within it continues to develop rather than disappearing with its maker.

The Architectural Archive makes that transmission visible. Each panel carries traces of the past and the perspective of the apprentice who composed it, helping to sustain the future of the workshop.

Collecting the Architectural Archive

The first release comprises six large compositions and one smaller Gothic panel, each dated 20 July 2026 and individually catalogued.

The large panels measure 40.5 × 53 cm and are available for €550 each. Architectural Archive No. 07, the smaller panel, is available for €300. Every acquisition is handled personally, with availability and delivery confirmed through private enquiry with the studio.

Lansdown Arts will present its 2026 collection at the KDF Christmas Show in London on 28 and 29 November, alongside new works currently taking shape in the Gabian studio.

Follow the studio’s preparations for London 2026, including new works and updates from Gabian.

Passed between generations of makers, these fragments offer an intimate view into fifty years of carving and the living craft they will continue to serve.