House design mistakes are all around us. Unfortunately, we tend to look right by them. But I’m on a mission to point some of these out, just to raise the bar on what we “demand” of the marketplace in terms of house design. Often, the mistakes could have been easily avoided, if only someone bothered to think about what they were doing. Here’s the photo of DHF #2 again:

Dream House Fumble #2

    What caught my eye here was the little roof above the garage door. This kind of a roof that’s attached to a wall is what I’ve always called a “pent eave.” That might be an old, northeastern building expression. Now that I live in the south, I hear this type of roof called a “watertable.” No matter what it’s called, it should be positioned lower on the wall so it can look like it’s doing its job of sheltering the garage doors. In this application, not only does it deny its purpose, but it interferes with the geometry of the gable roof above it. I suppose the architect was intent on getting wall-mounted light fixtures above the garage doors so they had to move the roof up to do it. Or maybe the lights were added to fill up wall space once the problem of the pent eave roof location was discovered. Who knows!

    There are other problems with this house that we could discuss, such as the lack of a proper entry experience by presenting the garage doors first instead of the front door, the “glued-on” brick front, the troublesome little downslope of the driveway that directs rainwater into the doors, and even the questionable use of keystones above the long, flat garage door heads. But we’ll save those topics for future posts.

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    Maybe the bubble got stuck in his level.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com