La Vie – click on any image for full size
Reader and fellow grid traveller Diomita Maurer (her blog is here) dropped me a line about the winter look at La Vie, the homestead by Krys Vita and Arol Lightfoot we’ve visited twice before (see here and here for more), suggesting Caitlyn and I pay it a further visit before the snow melts. So, we headed over for a look.
As with the autumn build, which we visited in October, the winter design is built around a central body of water. However, almost everything else within the region has been completely redesigned and covered in a soft blanket of snow – with more falling from the sky – although it does retain the same use of muted colours and soft tones.
Visitors arrive on a track running along the bank of this water, the snow finding it hard to gain a purchase on the rutted earth. Set back from this track sits a large house, aged both inside and out, warmly furnished and decorated for Christmas. In the ground behind the house sits a raised deck with a small gazebo and swing, a hot tub sitting out under the falling snow, its heat countering the colder air. The deck offers a view out over the frigid waters surround the land, a view which likely makes the water in the hot tub all that more inviting as a means of avoiding the cold.
The reason the snow is having a hard time finding purchase on the track is revealed further around the central pond: a tracked snow plough is paused mid-way through its work of clearing the worst of the snow. It sits parked near the towers of an old ski lift, a rezzing point for sledges at the best of one of the towers. Nor is this the only rezzer in the region: a closer look at the pond will reveal signboards offering skates for those who ice a little dancing on ice.
Follow the track in the opposite direction to the snow plough, and it will loop you around the pond to another house, a small shack selling fir trees beside it. The track ends just beyond this, but travellers can continue across the rough terrain, to where a fence marks the boundary of another house, sitting in the south-west corner of the land. A rugged, curve ridge rises westward of this house, climbing in steps to a flat table of rock topped by an old church – although there doesn’t appear to be a way to easily climb the rocks and reach it.
Across this landscape sit cars and tucks with fir trees strapped to roofs, in the flat beds or poking out of the sunroof. There are also numerous places to sit – from sleighs pulled by a horse or reindeer to park benches to swings – as well as in the houses. These combine to make La Vie’s winter setting very pleasing to see and photograph and in which to spend time sitting, talking and just passing the time.
We once again enjoyed our time visiting, and will doubtless return to see further seasonal changes at La Vie.
SLurl Details
- La Vie (La Vie, rated; Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 