Self Study 1: Barrel + Tasmanian Tourist Attraction

I've never used Blender before, so the results are fairly dodgy. This is a barrel I made using the following tutorial:

My barrel:

Overall I was happy with the sculpting, but my lack of artistic skills have left the textures being dull.  

For the Tasmanian tourist attraction, I decided to model the Wrest Point tower. I chose this because it is an interesting looking building, and also because I work there. I decided to model it using a simplified cartoonish approach, focussing more on achieving the overall look of the building rather than getting every detail exact. I believe the end result is recognisable enough that most people would see it and say that it is the Wrest Point Tower. 

Reference Image (source  Wikimedia Commons):

My model: 

My approach was very simple. I started with a cylinder mesh and made a bunch of loop cuts to divide the cylinder into several rectangles. These rectangles were then divided into 'window' and 'wall' columns  on the exterior of the mesh, with the 'wall' rectangles extruded to create the shape of the sides of the building. To create the top part of the building I inset the top cylinder face and then extruded / bevelled it until I achieved the intended result. Texturing was very simple, as I first blasted the model with off-white and then separated the window sections in edit mode to colour them in dark blue with a single click.

Overall I am happy with the result but there is a lot of room for improvement. Given additional time I would have improved the textures and made the model more accurate by including the correct amount of windows and adjusting the scale to be more realistic. I would really like to add a reflective glass texture to the windows, which I may look into adding at a later date.

Update (19/07/2022):

I tried to add the main entrance to the building in order to make it look more complete. I didn't have much time so it is super simple. I just added a mesh for the roof and gave it a blue material, and then added another mesh for the entrance walls. I also added text and coloured it gold for the logo. I did not add any textures to these new elements as I ran out of time, but given more time I would refine the entrance so that it doesn't look as rough. 

Reference Image (source https://www.skyscrapercenter.com/building/wrest-point-casino/22793):

My model: