In a one story, you have more flexibility to play with ceiling heights and styles. You can use vaults, barrel vaults, and trays and soffits to create not only a sense of height but also visual cues to break up open spaces into "rooms" without actually adding walls.

Even if you're building such a large house, you could benefit by looking at Sarah Susanka's Not So Big House books which talk a lot about design principles and using light, creating views and visual cues within the house to make it more livable. She also talks about ceiling height to room size.

Below is a more mathematical approach to thinking about ceiling height. What you don't want to do is build rooms that feel like an elevator shaft because they are so small for the height of the ceiling....

Here is a link that might be useful: Divine proportions

Our home has 9ft ceilings and they seem plenty high to me. Our rooms arent quite as large as yours though.

I think the feel is really going to depend on other aspects of your home like door heights and the flow between open rooms such as the kitchen/living areas. How your cabinets are in your bathrooms/kitchen/where ever else. My parents have beautiful 14 ft ceilings in their main living areas and 9ft everywhere else. You can do a lot of fun things with vaulted ceilings that can really make a room unique!

As for heating/cooling. That's also going to depend on what you're doing with your windows since your walls are so tall. In my parents large living area they have huge windows that basically fill the exterior walls. It looks beautiful, but they pay an arm and a leg to heat and cool their home. Over twice as much as we do and they only have a couple hundred more square feet of living area than we do. We are also in a bipolar climate though where it is 90s-100s in the summer and 20s to somewhere below zero in the winter. So I'm not sure how much help I am there!

We built a two story house, with 10ft ceilings on the 1st floor & 9' on the second. However, our master br is down and in a wing off the back, so we decided to take the ceiling all the way up to the roofline of the wing. We put beams in the vault and it is quite attractive, BUT...we find that such a high ceiling isn't really conducive to a nice, cozy, feel for a bedroom. Honestly, it has sort of a train station feel. 10' with coffers would have been just right in there. I am a big fan of high ceilings...but bedrooms are private areas and I think need a bit lower ceiling.

Like some of the others we had a one story with 9' ceilings and loved them. I can't quite picture 12' ceilings, seems like the only word I can come up with is "cavernous"? Giant rooms with doorways that would look "dwarfed" next to the height of the ceiling. How would you choose your wall hangings, lighting, etc.? Since you are building such a huge home maybe it would be perfect?

We have stayed with some people who live in Chico, CA. Is the climate where you're building similar to Chico? I'm asking because their house is great for the climate but I've only been there in the heat of summer, not the winter, so I'm unsure of how their home works when it's colder out.

They have very high vaulted ceilings in their main living spaces. Their home is what I think you'd call Spanish Mission in style so their floors are stained concrete that they used some kind of cookie-cutter contraption to make look like...oh, words escape me, like large, slightly worn, rectangular tiles. The heat rises and the concrete feels cool so they rarely have to use any AC even on the hottest days. Fairly deep eaves help with that as well as they have a lot of windows in order to enjoy the views.

The bedrooms still had fairly high ceilings. IIRC, maybe about 9 feet, so they also stayed cooler. They also had transom windows above the bedroom/bathroom doors to allow air flow so those rooms didn't get over-heated.

When we were there, it was in the high 90's/low 100's and no AC was ever turned on.

I have no idea what the winter is like in that house though. And I don't know them well enough to contact them to ask. They were friends of friends we were traveling with at the time and we've gotten out of touch with the friends we were traveling with as this was over 20 years ago.

I don't know if this is much help or not.

So much of ceiling height choice is just preference. I really prefer 10 ft ceilings over 12, The difference between 8 and 10 ft. ceilings is huge! But I'm a woman on the shorter side, so maybe a guy might have a different view? We are in Central/Northern Cal too and lots of 1 story homes seem to have these 12 foot ceilings don't they? I find them awfully cold and the lighting hangs weirdly unless planned well. Great rooms can usually handle the height, but the other rooms feel like elevator shafts, and lots of the walls look barren unless you fill them with art and/or have an eye for interior design and ceiling treatments. Maybe that's you?! If you can find some model homes (or open houses) to walk through and measure the ceiling height in the rooms you like - that would give you the best answer.

High ceilings are great. I have 10' in my house now in the basement (no I did not build this house...) first floor, and vaulted ceilings in the 2nd floor and finished attic. 10' seems quite adequate to me, but it really depends on the space. I prefer shorter heights in the bedrooms (ours vaults up to around 17 feet!) and expecially in the bath where high ceilings steal all the heat from running a shower.

But I live in TN where it gets cold in the winter. I get a chill these days leaving the shower in the bathroom with a ceiling that goes up to about 15'. Plus for the added expense of going above 8' do you want to spend it in rooms you don't spend much time in? Or would you rather put that into an outdoor jacuzzi???

But if your main problem is heat, higher is better. The cool thing about building is _you_ get what _you_ want.

I live in TX where most new homes have 12' ceilings. When I built almost 7 years ago they were standard, but 8' doors/door frames were not, that was an upgrade but was somehow not mentioned to me. I 'thought' to have the front entrance door upgraded to 8', but not others in the house. If you decide to have 12' ceilings, please take into consideration having ALL doors/frames at 8' so it's a balanced look.

My old master bedroom was 20x20 and had a huge cathedral ceiling. Just airy and wonderful. I fell in love with that room from the moment I walked into it. But, it was impossible to heat and cool properly. In the summer, it was too hot and in the winters it was too cold. I don't know how high the ceiling went up to, but you can see from the angle that there is some definite space there. A thought I'll add though is this was the 2nd story of the house and our house was a spec home built by D.R. Horton who just didn't build it in a quality way.

Our new house is going to have up to 10 foot ceilings and I we probably could have gotten away with 9 foot ceilings. No way to 8 foot. I am over 6'0 and 8 foot ceilings seem so tight to me. We are doing a double box ceiling in the master for some height, but not too much.

I live in Texas and experience all 4 seasons. We have freezing winters and 100+ degree summers. The more room you have, the more space you have to heat and air condition. I would imagine though, if you have good insulation and get some good windows that you wouldn't have to deal with the problems we had as much.

Forgoing high ceilings because of HVAC problems is a poor decision because that can be fixed with proper insulation and air sealing.

Jrldh, as well as ceiling fans. ;)

Like most design decisions the ceiling height should not be determined simply by personal preference but by how well it supports and reinforces the design of the house. For instance, one of the best reasons for a tall ceiling is to raise the height of window heads and allow more light to penetrate more deeply into the room or to allow a better view of mountains. If those features are not appropriate or desired, a tall ceiling might be oppressive or otherwise inappropriate.

I renovated a house on Cape Cod that had an 18 ft high ceiling and a view of the ocean. After a lot of hand-wringing the owners agreed it was best to add the new master bedroom on a second level and have a ceiling height of 8-6 on each floor to take advantage of the ocean view from both floors and provide more comfort in the winter.

I can never answer these kinds of questions without understanding the design concept of the house. In my suburban projects a 9 ft ceiling has been preferred.

We are halfway through the process of building and we did 12 ft ceilings in main living areas and 10 ft in bedrooms and bathrooms. The doors are 8 ft and the windows are over 8 ft tall. We have geothermal heating and cooling.

This post was edited by gscott991 on Wed, Dec 31, 14 at 17:15

Photo 2

Exterior photo

I lived part of my childhood in a house with 14 foot ceilings throughout, and there was absolutely nothing cozy about it. "Hotel lobby" and "elevator shaft" come to mind. :)

Personally, I would never go above ten foot ceilings in a bedroom, if I had an option. And I certainly wouldn't go above that in a bathroom, but it's all about personal preference.

I'm in a single story with 12' ceilings throughout. Your bedrooms sound big enough that the height will be fine.

10' in the bedrooms will give a little more of a homey feel that's really just a personal preference. My previous house had 10' ceilings and I can't say that I really gave it much thought in the bedrooms until just now. The common areas (great room, kitchen, etc) is where you get the biggest impact of the extra height. Oh I should mention that I think my bathrooms have lower ceilings (except for the master) which is appropriate given their smaller footprint.

We built our 3 story home here in central coastal California four years ago. Summers often average 90's, and winter nights in 30's. Our ceilings are mostly 10'. We insisted on LOTS of insulation- exterior and interior walls, under the house and in the ceilings and roof. We rarely need the A/C in the summer, and even the cold is not bad in the winter.

We love the taller ceilings. We did add crown molding throughout. A definite plus to tall ceilings is that you have more options in both lighting and ceiling fans. We did make the bedrooms 9 '. I think the 10' would have been nice, but there were cost considerations, and the building department had height limits for the overall house. One drawback is that taller ceilings can make rooms reverberate more (echoing/noisy). You can overcome this by breaking up the room with angles, and especially adding soft surfaces.