Hourigan’s model features the van’s familiar faded signs, but also tiny clay doughnuts, its distinct dolphin jam dispenser, a small trolley and plastic buckets made from the nozzle of an eyeglass cleaner bottle.

A Yarraville pigeon club, which is still standing in Regent Street, is meticulously re-created in balsa wood, with clay pigeons on a fence, and weeds and a tiny water meter adorning its forecourt.

Hourigan’s aim is to hold an exhibition later this year, to sell some of the pieces, which can fetch several thousand dollars each.

Already, a Sydney woman has commissioned him to make a model of a Cuban sandwich shop for her American husband.

The Yarraville chicken shop model, based on a closed shop in O’Farrell Street, with a mural of three dancing chickens, is currently on display at Brunswick Street Gallery.

Hourigan, 44, grew up among industrial buildings up in the now gentrified Sydney suburb of Concord.

As a child, he would build kit models of tanks and aeroplanes.

His former job designing catalogues at KMart was creative, but the work was ‘‘designed by committee’’.

His new venture started by wandering the streets with his sketchbook.

‘‘I like the neighbourhood I’m in and I feel like some of these old, unloved places are under threat," he said.

"I wanted to capture them before they disappear.’’

Great patience is needed for features such as the bricks on a model of an electrial substation in Seddon.

The bricks are made by stamping a sheet of insulation foam with a copper mould. But each ‘‘brick’’ has to be stamped individually, because in real life, bricks deviate or are chipped.

For future models, he has his eye on an old masonic hall in Newport — ‘‘It’s beautiful, this ridiculously grand building and it’s been empty for 10 years and there’s broken windows and graffiti’’. He also likes an old foundry in Ballarat Road, Footscray; and the recently closed Dancing Dog Cafe.

‘‘I love the unloved,’’ Hourigan says. ‘‘It’s the ones that are slowly falling apart — there’s a beauty in that to me.

"You can see how it was once perfect, and the ravages of time gives it much more personality.’’

‘‘A couple of people said, ‘you should approach architects and build models [of new developments] for them’, but I don’t want to build these slick, perfect buildings.

"I like ‘decrepit’. I like things are falling down or rusty and the paint's flaking off.

"I think it’s got a lot more personality and quirkiness than a really slick, hard edged building that’s perfect.’’