Paper City Buildings — Cut & Fold (House / Shop / School / Church)

A consistent footprint is what turns four templates into a city

Paper city buildings are the entry point for tabletop dioramas, model railway scenery, classroom "town" projects, and storytelling backdrops for puppet shows. The trick to making a city look like a city rather than four random buildings is a consistent footprint — every template on this page renders against a 50 × 30 mm base, so houses, shops, schools, and churches line up shoulder-to-shoulder on a printed street without scale-mismatch.

All four nets follow the same 4-wall + roof + base structure: front wall (with the decorated facade), right depth wall, back wall, left depth wall, base under the back wall, and roof slopes attached above the gables. Variations are in wall height (school is the tallest), roof shape (church has the steepest gable plus a steeple cross; shop has a near-flat roof with an awning), and front-wall decor: gabled house with two double-hung windows and a door, shop with display window and OPEN awning, school with tall door and a grid of windows, church with arched door and rose window.

Solid = cut, dashed = fold, glue tabs at the bottom of each wall lock to the base. Score every dashed line with a bone folder before folding. Print the same building twice with different colours for a row of distinct shops; print the church scaled down for a chapel.

Pair with the Paper Toy Vehicles for cars and trucks parked on the street, or with the Paper Bag Puppets for storytelling characters that visit each building.