Medieval houses set review

Roughly two months ago I ran across Urbanmatz, a retailer of prepainted terrain and gaming mats. I saw that they were taking pre-orders for some painted terrain. As soon as the set became available I purchased one to add to my terrain collection. 

The set arrived last weekend and I've taken a closer look, do the pre-paint and house quality hold up?

What you get in the set is 6 buildings and a bridge. You get 3 copies of a large dwelling, 2 copies of a smaller dwelling, 1 blacksmith and the stone bridge which is a huge terrain piece. The price at 119Euro for 7 pieces of solid terrain is fair with an average price of 17Euro per model. No assembly required and they come prepainted.

The quality of the castings is good, and the sculpts themselves are imo very nice, especially the smaller buildings with the more intricate wooden framing. They look very medieval/European. The blacksmith is my favorite piece, and it the largest building.

The bridge is also nice, and it is large enough to allow you to put the popular "Battlefield in a box"/Flames of War river terrain below.

But the main reason I purchased the prepainted buildings was that the paintjob looked very promising on the pictures up on the retailers homepage. Having received the buildings and having inspected them up close I admit that the paintjob was not as good as I had hoped. The buildings are tabletop quality and still look great at an arm's length, but for a neat freak like me there were mainly issues with paint splotches on some of the walls and such that lowered the general impression. 

This does not mean that the paintjob is awful, but I wish it was a bit more tidy. This however prompted be to try to repaint one of the buildings just to see how that would work. I did that grom scratch, by undercoating the building with black primer, then drybrushing and washing the stonework, repainting the wooden framing and drybrushing the roof.

 I'm in the process of repainting one of the smaller buildings, and this time I tried to do that without any black undercoat, and it worked equally well - you will be able to see some WIP pictures of that on my facebook page.

The paintjob took about 2 hours, which is good enough for me to get a slightly cleaner result.

Overall, I still recommend the buildings for the sculpts themselves. They look great, and the material is some kind of durable plastic/resin that does not chip. So if you need to add some stone buildings to your collection of fantasy or historical terrain, these are great.

Repainted example