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Residential / Architectural Visualization — 2009 · Buena Vista Homes

Avenda

A daylight street view of a two-storey detached house: cream rendered walls with tan trim and quoins under a crowded brown tiled roof of multiple hipped and pitched planes, its tall front gable framing a deep arched entrance loggia. A first-floor balcony with a dark timber cross-railed balustrade sits above the loggia, chairs visible behind it. A low white boundary wall with tan capping and arched metal railings runs across the front, broken by a black metal sliding gate across the paved driveway behind which a red saloon is parked, with ornate twin-head lamp posts at the piers and young palms, shrubs and a clipped hedge in the beds. A paved footpath and asphalt road fill the foreground, the sky is pale blue with light cloud, and a cut-out figure of a woman carrying a bag walks at the right edge to give the elevation its scale.

A single daylight exterior of Avenda, one of the houses at the Buena Vista development, published in September 2009 with the studio credited only for rendering and post-processing.

The post is one line long. Under the title AVENDA - BUENA VISTA, RENDERING AND POSTPROCESSING, published at 15:54 on 17 September 2009, the studio’s entire commentary reads “A new one.” There are no labels, and on its own the post names nobody — no client, no designer, no software list, no description of the site. What it leaves out, its siblings supply: everything this record knows about the work comes from the title, from the caption strip printed on the image, and from the four Buena Vista posts that came before it.

Those siblings matter, because Avenda is not a standalone commission but the last frame in a run the studio posted under the Buena Vista name between December 2008 and September 2009 — the posts titled Buena Vista Homes, Buena Vista Beach Road, Buena Vista 3, and Penta, which went up eighteen minutes before Avenda on the same afternoon. The earliest of them records who the work was for: Jeff Doe, described as a friend and a talented designer, called the studio to help model and render two-bedroom and three-bedroom houses for Buena Vista Homes. The June 2009 post then splits the labour in the studio’s own words — the design, the model and some of the texturing were Jeff’s, while “we did the final texturing, final rendering and post processing in photoshop” — and places the development at Sakumono in Greater Accra. That division is why four of the five titles end in “rendering and post processing” rather than claiming the design: the house arrives as a model and what is on show is the lighting, the materials and the final pass.

The house itself is a two-storey detached plan in the manner the development was marketing: cream rendered walls picked out in tan, quoins at the corners, and a deliberately crowded brown tiled roof of crossed hips and pitches that breaks the mass into parts. The entrance is the set piece — a deep arched loggia recessed under a tall front gable, with a first-floor balcony above it in a dark cross-railed balustrade. In front, a low white wall with tan capping and arched metal railings, a sliding gate across the paved drive, a red saloon parked behind it, ornate twin-head lamp posts at the piers, and young palms and clipped beds doing the selling.

A cut-out figure of a woman walking at the right edge carries the scale, a convention of the period’s marketing renders. The plate is signed along its bottom edge — AVENDA DAY02 / 2009 / THE.SEED.V1.0 at one end and REVIVAL DESIGN+VFX STUDIOS / REVIVALGH.BLOGSPOT.COM at the other. The DAY02 marks this as a daylight variant on a second pass, and the V1.0 stamp, pointing at the blog rather than a studio domain, is the earliest signature the archive holds; Deneese carries the same strip two weeks later. The post is on blogspot.

A daylight street view of a two-storey detached house: cream rendered walls with tan trim and quoins under a crowded brown tiled roof of multiple hipped and pitched planes, its tall front gable framing a deep arched entrance loggia. A first-floor balcony with a dark timber cross-railed balustrade sits above the loggia, chairs visible behind it. A low white boundary wall with tan capping and arched metal railings runs across the front, broken by a black metal sliding gate across the paved driveway behind which a red saloon is parked, with ornate twin-head lamp posts at the piers and young palms, shrubs and a clipped hedge in the beds. A paved footpath and asphalt road fill the foreground, the sky is pale blue with light cloud, and a cut-out figure of a woman carrying a bag walks at the right edge to give the elevation its scale.