@davestewart
As said in the documentation a facade must extend Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade and implement getFacadeAccessor. The facade access the Service Container returned by getFacadeAccessor (actually the function must return the name).
In conclusion I think you must register a Service Container which returns an instance of the model and then create a Facade on that.
Static method sounds more practical.
Actually I've checked the base Illuminate class Model and all the common methods there are actually static, so I was labouring under a misapprehension that all the :: methods were accessed via a facade.