The Architectural Archive: Casting Panels — Nos. 01–06

An Architectural Archive of the Lansdown studio, from a lifetime of craft.

Our Castings Panels started with Eric’s mother Carole Lansdown, a decorative artist, builder and designer with classical tastes. Inspired after a visit to Sir John Soane's Museum in London, she began to make presentation display panels with Eric’s castings. 

The castings operation for Eric's dollhouses produce extras and seconds that Carole would rework into playful arrangements of classical decorative architectural elements, originally carved from wood in miniature. 

Some of his chisels were inherited from his grand aunt Edith Hamlin, a muralist and mosaic artist who used them with her husband Maynard Dixon carve the frames for their paintings.

Carole Lansdown developed many of the painted decorative themes that went onto Eric’s architectural creations. This was the dynamic from the start and continued with collaborations from the entire family.

The series connects the family studio’s past with its future. The style and theme of these panels continues to this day as Eric Lansdown produces more carvings, adding on to the collection. 

Each panel carries fifty years of carved forms in collaboration with a new generation of young artists that are learning the myriad of skills to take this operation into the future and support their independent creations too.

Preeminent Dollhouse Artist presents for the new year 2026.

Eric Lansdown came from a San Francisco family of Artists. His career took off in 1979 when a journalist noticed his dollhouse studio on a 30 meter tuna boat he had rescued from a watery grave. Docked on tugboat alley on pier 42 on the San Francisco Embarkedero. 
None of that is left, it's a stadium now, but he's still at it! Now he's working in a 1000 year old fortress overlooking the Tounge river in Occitan France. Lansdown Studio art school is dedicated to passing on Eric Lansdown's skills and his trade to the next generation.

Discover the companion small-format work, Architectural Archive No. 07.