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I finally got my hands on a Skullvane Manse, and have quickly bodged the thing together. Here's what they don't tell you in White Dwarf:

The observatory will fit on the base of the leaning tower all by itself. This doesn't look implausibly top heavy, or remarkably silly. In fact, it looks pretty good.

The Tower has 'dangling' bricks which are quite easy to remove with a jeweler's saw. Once that is done, you have a nice tower with two levels, battlements on the top, and an optional wooden catwalk and stair, which still assemble and mount just fine.

If you remove (heck, snap off!) one flagstone, the 'bridge to nowhere' from the manse nicely slots into the slot at the base of the door on the second level. It's not perfect, but the missing stones look like a natural gap from disrepair. Removal of the 'dangling bricks' makes the tower the exact right height for this to fit.

The tower makes a nice piece of terrain all by itself. It would be slightly small, but for players using the Folding Fortress, it is an ideal tower, small enough to tote to games, but still clearly a defensible fort.

The building is still laden with skull imagery, but repurposing the tower makes the whole construction look much better, in my opinion. The tower expands the footprint of the model (making it a three-section building) and is also useful in it's own right.

I don't think I would have been happy with this model if it were assembled in either of the GW depicted 'observatory' or 'battlement' formations, but with these modifications, I'm quite happy with the purchase. To their credit, GW does acknowledge in the instructions that the observatory can be fitted to the base sans tower, but does not suggest any alternate use of the tower itself. If the tower did not have odd, unexplained 'dangling bricks', it would be immediately apparent to anyone. However, they are trivially easy to remove (and hey, some spare detritus for bases!).

Sounds good - pics, please! I'd wondered about the giant skulls on the tower walls - how easy would it be to razor-saw them off? (Obvously reconstructing brickwork in the resulting holes wouldn't be trivial.)

I look forward to seeing some conversions of this kit, in particular in combination with the Fortified Manor buildings.

Let's see how you've used it and how it looks with an alternate build?

Pics?