Hood planning

I had a look at the website and I do not think that there is a possibility to see the different types of areas there.
I assume that you would have to look up that kind of information for each municipality separately. For the ones at which I had a look, there was no full map available. I had to look up the protocols of the building committee and if new areas were assigned, there was a picture of the planned layout in that one protocol when this topic was discussd. Thus, the information should be spread between many different protocols, many of them from decades ago with lots of not yet digitalized information.
There also is the Grundbuch, a public register for all lots in Germany that is fully digitalized, but to obtain an excerpt of that register, you have to have a legitimate interest and it costs 10 euros per excerpt (containing the information about a single lot).

If you do not plan to recreate the Sims 4 lots, that quarter will appear more authentic. If you just plan to have residential lots there, Crumbling Isle might have been a village that was incorporated into Windenburg at some point in time. Then all buildings would be older and might have a bit different styles. It also could have been an estate with a manor and servants' houses. Former subsidiary buildings like stables and barns might have been converted into expensive houses and apartments. In that case, most or all the buildings would be from a similar period in time, just with different price ranges. The converted buildings would be quite modern inside. Loft style is rather popular for this kind of converted buildings, but of course, it is not the only possible style. For the manor and the servants' buildings, you could decide on whether they are renovated and modern inside. The manor and the converted subsidiary buildings would be in the center and the servants's houses would be more remote. As the servants' houses were of lower quality than the main buildings, you also could decide that they decayed faster and that for this reason fewer or no ones are remaining.


Build/buy

You could build houses for EA. They also tend to forget the railing quite often.
While sims cannot fall and injure themselves, German building legislation still requires railings for all stairs that have more than three steps. If you want more information, you may look up DIN 18065. The regulations of this norm may be complemented by additional regulations in each municipality.

Picture 1: For that form, the most common material is plastic and such waste bins usually just have one plain color. Neutral colors are more common, but any color is possible. A metal mesh (like this https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p...a-7DgNOYvPNrzAz) also would be possible, if it is possible to have transparent parts in the texture. There also were a few ones with wooden colors, but those wooden colors were light ones and the wood grain was barely visible. The waste bin in the picture due to its texture looks like a wood fiber plant pot somehow imho.

Picture 3: I would remove item 4. I also would remove the rug unless you have an object that fits beneath to explain the slope on the left side. Wrinkles are fine, but the sloped part looks like it ignores fundamental physical laws.
Rug 14 has a pattern that has been common for a really long time. Those type of rugs usually were rather small and available for a relatively low price in furniture shops. The pattern of rug 6 looks more like a blanket pattern to me. I am absolutely not able to tell you which rug patterns were relevant in which part of the 00s. Rug 13 looks stripy enough to get a similar judgement as rug 14, although it would have been less common than rug 14 due to size, colors and the flowers between the stripes.
My general experience: More expensive/expensive-looking furniture often was combined with Persian/Persian-looking rugs (dark wood mostly combined with dark and red rug colors, light wood mostly combined with light and blue or cream rug colors), mainly owned by older and middle-aged people. IKEA rugs mainly were combined with IKEA furniture and were mainly owned by younger and middle-aged people, usually people who had moved out and established their own household. The striped rugs often were used in situations when you needed a robust rug, like on a balcony, as a blanket for pets, in children's bedrooms next to their beds etc. Some people also had a big rug in a plain color in their living room for couches, armchairs and coffee table that covered most of the floor.

Picture 4: As item 9 does not really look like a book, I woul remove it.


Windenburg builds

BaWü Fachwerk apartment
Do you have a link with the pictures for me once more? I had a look at the last couple of postings, but I could not find it.
Regarding the households I had suggested: Is any of these households living on government assistance? If yes, the apartment should not be bigger than suggested because in that case there are limits for the maximum allowed apartment size and if the apartment is too big, people will have to move to a smaller apartment. In cases, where it is not possible to find a smaller apartment, authorities have the right (and sometimes really do this) to lock rooms of the too big apartment so that the tenants just may use the amount of space that is considered appropriate for their household size.


New builds

Kirchstraße FWH
Shop ideas: Wrist watches often also are sold in jewellery shops. As the shop is rather small, that would be a good choice imho. Alternatively, clocks also could be sold with furniture or electronics or maybe even robots.
Stairs: You could use regular modular stairs instead. Six tiles is enough space for that and you could place the second set of stairs directly on top of the first set, if you use modular ones.
Apartment size: I am quite sure that the attic room does not count as "Wohnfläche" (living space) for calculating the rent when the room can only be accessed via Luke and ladder. Therefore, there would be no incentive for the landlord to include the attic room into a rental contract. If you want to include the room into the apartment, you should add stairs. (If regular non-modular stairs are stockable, that might be an option to access the attic.)
Household: In RL, rental apartments of such a size are not that common. More apartments of that size are owned apartments. Unfortunately, owned apartments are not possible ingame. If you exclude the attic, the apartment might be an option for a family with three children. Both parents would have to have jobs to be able to afford the rent although they do not necessarily have to be academics. Including the attic, I think that the apartment would be too expensive for a nuclear family. Maybe it could be suited for a three-generational family (although those more often live in owned houses in rural areas) or as a shared apartment for some younger or middle-aged friends. If you want to add a special household to the neighborhood, the apartment also could be used for supervised living for teenagers who had been removed from their families due to neglect (or other problems) or adults with mental handicaps.
Wall column: On the ground floor and in the attic, there is a wall column, but there is no corresponding column in the other two floors. The column most likely contains the chimney. Therefore, it should be on all floors.
Reference pictures: This attic definitely is not living space. I would not include it in the apartment. A decorative Luke without real access should be sufficient.

Bonn apartment
Felege family: What are the apartment sizes? As the family despends on state support, the size limits depending on the number of household members are relatively strict. The style of the house is fitting for a household that moved to the village/town relatively recently.
Waste bin(s): As I am not sure whether you used the plural because of the different types of bins or because you think that each household has its own set of bins: In apartment buildings, waste bins are shared and people try to keep the number of waste bins (at least the black ones) as low as possible so that they do not have to pay unneccessary money to the waste collection company. For four households, one black bin might work (unless diaper-aged children are living there). There also should be just one blue bin. There might be one or two yellow bins. I am not sure whether the apartment building should have a brown bin (organic waste) at all. The more people share a bin, the more likely one of them throws stuff into the bin which may not be disposed there. Most municipalities check the content of the bins every now and then and if they discover wrong stuff in the bin, the household receives a warning first and after a few incidents, they lose the right to have a brown bin (which usually does not cost money) and have to use the black bin (that costs money) instead. If the one black bin already is relatively full whenever it is collected, they might need a second black bin and therefore have to pay the double amount for the waste collection. (Sorry for the side note.) Back to the original question: If there is no connection from the back to the front of the house, the bins have to be placed in front of the house. Otherwise the tenants of the upper floors could not reach it and it would be disgusting for the tenants of the ground floor to move the bins through their apartments. The bins, of course, have to be placed on the lot itself and not on the sidewalk (except for the day when the waste is collected).
Front view reference & map: The walls of the house are not exactly parallel to the street. Therefore, on the left side of the house (in the front view picture), there is a small strip of land in front of the house (beneath the balcony) that belongs to the lot. I assume that the waste bins always are placed where they are placed in this picture. Ingame, you will always have at least one tile between sidewalk and the outer wall. That tile is where I would place the bins. (And as you can see in the picture preferably not directly beneath the window.)
Original layouts: The two ground floor apartments are too small for the Felege family and the two apartments on the upper floors should be too big.

Multi-gen FWH Markstraße
Behr household: I am sorry, but I am not able to remember all your households and it is quite time-consuming to go through all the links from the last couple of postings to find the right information. It would be great, if you could give me a short summary of the family (number of sims, ages, income and special attributes like pets).
Side view: Can you replace the windows with smaller ones?
Hauswirtschaftszimmer: Usually, it is just a laundry room. Housekeeping area seems to be a common translation.
Jewellery shop: If you know the company name, you could look it up in the Handelsregister (commercial register). If you use the official website, this information is available for free.
Rear view: Maybe a ladder as connection between the two balconies would work better than the spiral stairs?
Front & back door: I am sure that this could be changed if the owners want to. I guess the current owners just got so used to using the back door while there still was a shop in the front area that they did not change their habits after the shop closed.
Lot price: 175k is extremely cheap for a house with 325 m² living space. I searched for houses in my home region with a 100 km radius and the biggest house that I could find was a FWH with about 200 m² in a town of 4000 inhabitants. For more modern houses, about 160 m² was the maximum. Therefore, your reference house most likely needs a lot of money and renovations to provide an acceptable quality of living. Ingame, however, this low quality of living cannot really be realized. Therefore, the owners should be rather wealthy. If you think that the current owners did all the renovations, they should have a high income. If you think that the parents of the current owners already made bigger investments, a slightly above average income might be enough.

WHG Am Markt
Ground floor layout: Can you connect the room with the back entrance and the room with the stairs? It does not really make sense to have two walls and doors to reach the stairs. And as you already know, spiral stairs are not really an option for apartment buildings as they do not qualify as fire escape.
Shop layout: The whole front of the building should accessible to the customers. That way more products can be displayed in the windows and daylight is also nice to have. Maybe turn the right part of the building into a storage room, but make it smaller (so that the front of the room is added to the main shop room). If the shop is really successful, they might need additional storage room, but that additional storage also could be somewhere else where the rents are cheaper.
Business idea: I think guitars (or musical instruments in general) without the other stuff would be more than sufficient for that small shop. You might want to look up "Musikhaus Thomann". That is a German music shop located in a small village of about 200 inhabitants that apparently is has the highest sales numbers for a music shop worldwide (including their online business, of course).
OG: Please also replace the ladder with regular stairs - no matter what kind of changes you have to do to the layout, it will be worth it.
Household: As the apartment has two bedrooms and two more rooms that could be converted to additional bedrooms, it would be suited for a family. As it is rather small, it would be affordable for a family with a lower income. How many family members does the Felege family have? The size would be considered as suitable for five or more household members in RLP.


Culture

In my last posting, I just tried to list certain trends because it is difficult to pick a certain sim and say that this sim would have racist opinions. This does not mean that there racism, stereotypes and prejudices only exist in certain places. They exist everywhere, they just are more or less common. As an example: Far-right party AfD currently has 29-31 % in polls in Thüringen (where there will be elections on municipal level soon). In Germany as a whole, they have 16-19 % in polls (which still is far too much imho).
I do not use instagram, but if you can forward the text/images to me, I could translate a few of them for you.
The Youtuber that I mentioned is @ryanwass. I only have watched one video from him because it was linked somehwere and had a look at the titles of several other videos. Content about Bavaria definitely seems to be overrepresented, but matches American stereotypes about Germany. Nevertheless, there also are videos where he reacts to videos about working conditions, the university system, German fraternities, differences between German and American houses etc. that could contain new information for you.


Fashion

That definitely is possible. I guess that it also might be related to the different number of inhabitants of our countries. Germany with more than 80 million people is a bigger market for local film and TV productions, local music etc. Of course, we also are strongly influenced by the U.S., but maybe a bit less than other countries. I also assume that there are differences within Germany. In cities, people pick up trends quicker than in rural areas.
Brands: I think that this also depended a lot on the environment. In Gymnasium, it played a smaller role than in Hauptschule. And in a very rural area like my home area, where the Gymnasium pupils had very mixed backgrounds (from children of company owners to children of unemployed parents) it probably mattered even less.
Discount stores also were not yet that common. Kik was founded in 1994, but it took them many years before they opened a shop in my hometown. Therefore, you would have to own a car and be able afford fuel for a one hour drive to be able to go to a discount clothing shop.
Discount supermarkets like Aldi every now and then had some clothes as special offers, but without visible brands on them and you would not buy whole outfits there. There were shops with affordable clothes like C&A (although you also could get ball gowns for several hundred euros there) where you could get cheap basics and then mix them with more special items from other shops. There also were some regional chain stores that were quite popular and affordable.
Really poor people would rather go to a second-hand shop in our municipality instead of buying new stuff. I do not have any experience with that, but it would make sense if you can buy the same brands there, just from previous collections/years.
Extremely sandblasted jeans are nothing that I would necessarily associate with a cheap price. Basic items from cheap stores often were less remarkable than similar items from more popular stores. Therefore, people with that cheap clothing would not necessarily stick out and draw attention to their clothing. Therefore, I would assume that some of the "approved brands" started the trend first and the cheap stores only joined in later. Of course, there also was cheap fast fashion with low quality available in cheap stores, but you could avoid that stuff easily.

If you want to call it like that @Obelix look. Usually, these men wear cloth trousers and buttoned shirts, often with suspenders.

Middle-aged and elder women: For a middle-aged women, I would choose a simple, not fashionable pair of jeans, for the elder women rather cloth trousers. Depending on the season, they both could wear a wide cut t-shirt or pullover with plain color or unfashionable pattern. For elder women, I also recommend a Kittelschürze with skin colored tights and a t-shirt or pullover beneath: https://static.bnn.de/nachrichten/d...0056693758h.jpg This kind of clothing was considered fashionable for a short period of time when they were young and some women continued wearing Kittelschürzen for the rest of their lives.
If the temperature is a bit cooler, they also could wear an old, clunky cardigan on top pf t-shirt/pullover.
Shoes like these (also as sandal version with heel strap) also were quite common and often used inside the house, in the garden, but also for trips to the nearby town. https://schuherlebnis.de/media/[email protected]
For other types of shoes, you also can look up pictures of nuns (search terms e.g. Nonne Schuhe). In RL, I have also seen some nuns with outerwear that might be what you are looking for, but unfortunately, it seems more or less impossible to find pictures online because there are so many pictures of nun costumes.
I am sorry that I did not include more links. So many fashion shops have pictures of all their products online so that it is difficult to find unfashionable examples for pretty much all search terms.

My Germany trip!!! :D
So last month, my partner and I finally have visited the hamlet of interest in the Bergisches Land for my Veronaville inspiration because it isn't too far driving from Cologne, where my SO and I stayed for a party, and we got lucky with that rare moment of really warm weather last April! Aside of visiting those villages for my TS2 build research, we really enjoyed hiking in its tranquil forests and walking through the cozy and quiet non-touristic villages . My partner also liked those cutesy half-timbered houses (FWH). Indeed, that specific hamlet I had on the radar for a long time has the vibes of German Veronaville irl regarding the "Bauweise" and the population size (~500 inhabitants), except that it doesn't have a wide creek (it's located higher up in the hills). Most of the (monumental) FWH in that hamlet are detached civil houses with big yards and most of them are built between 18th to early 20th century, though I've also seen a post-war FWH at the main street of a 3k village further down at the river. I kept the details in mind you posted in reply no.11 ( https://modthesims.info/showthread....738#post5737738 ), where you mentioned that (spaciously) detached FWH are exceptional, but I think that the open building style was more common in certain areas of the Bergisches Land. After asking around about the architectural history in the local FB groups, I understood that the hamlets in the area we visited used to be very small settlements with enough space to build detached civil houses (Bürgerhäuser), and the reason for those big yards was to farm their own vegetation and small livestock, as the inhabitants had other occupations than agriculture, such as working in metal factories or as an artisan (metal mining/industry was only replaced by agriculture from early 20th century). So I observed that most of the FWH over there are not built as U-shaped or rectangular-shaped Bauernhäuser. And some of those civil FWH have bigger front yards than 3 tiles wide. Instead, the farms were built as Einzelhöfer outside of the villages (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einzelsiedlung ). However, even the 3k village/small town at the river, built as a Straßedorf with a church, also has a fair amount of detached civil FWH, especially at the outskirts. The longest attached build is 5 houses in a row in the center, while most of the other attached builds are duplexes and a few triplexes. Farming was not convenient in that valley because the hills are steep and swampy, hence the lack of Bauernhöfer there as well. I also noticed that some the FWH have fancy extensions, such as garages and balconies. I guess such kinds of extensions are possible there as its plots are spacious enough, although I wonder whether or not they were listed as monuments.
The builds I also observed in the hamlets I visited higher up in the hills, are a couple of MFH apartments and a few old Fachwerk duplex houses. The higher amount of MFHs in such a hamlet is because it was formerly a settlement for factory workers. But I assume that old big houses in villages, such as large Bürgerhäuser and pension houses, can also be converted into MFH. But in more rural and agricultural-oriented villages, I can imagine that bigger MFH are less common. Another inspiration I got during my hike is converting the silo into a lookout tower on the hills because we visited such a monument and we saw a few empty bottles of booze inside .
While you mentioned that many Germans cover their windows with sheer curtains, I was surprised that a fair amount of inhabitants do not cover their windows in the Veronaville-ish hamlet. But it must be noted that the windows in German houses are smaller than those in Dutch houses. You also mentioned that Jägerzäune are not common, but I observed they are fairly common in the villages I visited. Could be a regional thing, though (NRW vs RLP or Hessen).
So I conclude that the villages in the Bergisches Land with its Bergisches Häuser are the best references for my German twist on the Veronaville Lots . And apparently, the Bergs also have their own word for a hamlet/Weiler: http://www.wilmanns.com/wippe/hofschaftsdef.htm (+ topographical image: http://www.wilmanns.com/solingen/solingenrelief.jpg ). I am aware, though, that the smaller villages in NRW may be less rural than those in RLP and Hessen.
My partner and I definitely want to visit the nature of NRW again because we both enjoy hiking in quiet hilly forests with rivers/creeks and walking through villages with cute half-timbered houses! Also, it is not too far driving for me (3+ hours) and I found out I got a nice rush from driving on the Autobahn (yes, I'm aware of the laws around the advised 130 km/h limit and getting blinked by zoom-zoomies if I hog the left lane too long).

Builds & Hoods updates
So inspired by my trip in Germany, I shifted my focus from Windenburg builds to giving the original Via Veronaville Lots makeovers because I want to draw those houses for a panel in my TS2 comic.
For Windenburg, I don't use the Bergisches Land as inspiration, as the original Windenburg backdrop buildings consist of those tall multi-OG old houses, which is less common in the towns of Bergisches Land. For this subhood instead, I rather get my inspiration from cutesy old towns like Monschau (NRW), Adenau (RLP), and various towns in Hessen. Occasionaly, I browse on eBay Kleinanzeigen for ads of old/half-timbered WGH apartments with the hope to find good floorplans. I imagine that the Windslar area is another hamlet-y Ortsteil of Windenburg, but located higher up in the hills.

Update Baumann household (link: https://imgur.com/Q0FR8MJ )
I've rearranged the Baumann family and its relatives in Obsidian (link: https://imgur.com/a/5x2xcEH ). So Nikolas now has only one sister, and his Male relatives are cousins. Which household is most likely to stay with their widowed mom in her multigen house, Nikolas or Margret? I was thinking of Margret because Nikolas may have had more desire to move out because of his Romance Aspiration.

Buid updates
My apologies for the confusion. I will repost my image links to builds and households if I discuss them from now on for more clarity.

Here's my BaWü Fachwerk apartment build: https://imgur.com/a/64O4Mnp . I haven't made up yet which households rely on government benefits, aside of Felege.

Bonn apartment ( https://imgur.com/a/AocV9DR ): OG1 and OG2 are 111 m2 each. Felege is a 6-Sim refugee household (4 kids, but no pets): https://imgur.com/HCghB55

Multi-gen FWH ( https://imgur.com/a/9ZH0I0Z ): here's the link to the Behr household (6 Sims, 2 cats): https://imgur.com/ZoJ2F7m