I hope you will forgive me for saying this but I've yet to see a combination of big hipped and gabled roofs that was architecturally satisfying or coherent. It seems to be a standard method of the currently popular Neo-eclectic style for roofing a square house plan made large by a garage tucked into one corner. It's as if your cars were living in the house with you like family members.

There is a way to avoid this but it usually involves buying a larger lot. It also requires a designer with an unusually high level of skill. So its a design problen essentially brought on by cost constraints but if it is identified early enough there are often ways to make it better.

Garage is 25'x20'6". I like the suggestion of a window on the side of the garage. There will be a fence, but I think it'll start off the back corner of the garage so a window there might be good. We'll see if it's in the budget. The transom windows are all based on how we want to either layout the room, or to keep flexibility in laying out the room. The bedrooms that have them also gave full Windows on a different wall.

Thank you you for showing the lap siding instead of board and batton. I think we had a little too much going on there.

Our cars are our family members too. We use them every day ;). I get the disdain for front load garages but it's a trade off we're forced to accept, and honestly it's not a big deal for us at all.

The dining room will be a formal dining room, but daily meals will be at a kitchen table between the kitchen and family room. I know the stretch isn't ideal but is one of the trade offs we are ok with given the constraints of the lots here. Otherwise you come in the garage to the family room instead of the kitchen, or some other less than desirable layout.

Thanks for the feedback so far. Please keep it coming and I'm still looking for a suggestion on the gables. I think I have a solution in mind but I don't know that it'll work, so I'd love to see your ideas.

Do you need two dining spaces? How often will you use the dining room? Wouldn't it be better to make the area next to the kitchen the dining room and then combine the dining room with the living area into one large space? This way when you have more guests, you can expand. Also there are ways to enclose the kitchen so not to see the mess if you're entertaining.

It will get old quickly having to carry food around so many barriers to a dining room that is only used infrequently.

The hallmark of good design is to utilize the spaces to the best they can be. I understand narrow lots as I was on one before deciding to buy a bit of extra land for our narrow lot. However a house can be well designed on a narrow lot too but like JDS said, it takes a bit more planning and you usually don't get that from a builder. It usually takes someone with design vision.

Good you are getting close! Don't make the same mistake everyone else makes. Now is the time to consider your HVAC system. Will the air distribution fit? Where is the equipment being located? The BTU required will determine the size of the duct system and everyone makes the same mistake. They just take for granted the contractor will make it work and they end up with a system that makes to much noise and have hot and cold rooms all over the house. The time is now before the plans are final. You are spending a ton of money remember a comfortable home is a happy home. Learn about the systems that are out there. Learn the questions you need to be asking along with the right and wrong answers. The HVAC system is the hardest thing to try and fit into a set of plans.

The pantry looks a little narrow for an end-entry, but you can add storage by stealing from beneath the stairs. In the mudroom, you can steal some of that under-stair space for shoes and such.

Why do you need a shower in the downstairs bathroom? Not saying you don't need it, just making sure you do.

How will you use the dining room when you don't have company? Homework? Crafts? Second office?

i like the master suite arrangement a lot. I wonder if the kids' bathroom could go with just one sink and more storage. My two boys are never in there at the same time, and never. Ever. use the sink closest to the door. It just gets dusty. Meanwhile, their "stuff" needs more than a single bank of drawers and medicine cabinet for shaving, hair, skin care, orthodontia, first aid. Also, I wonder if you can scoot those two doors, to bedroom and bathroom, over just a skosh so that the door is not so much at the top of the stairs?

I didn't say anything about front loading garages; what I hate to see is a garage that is carved out of the corner of a house forcing the shape to be big and square with a big hipped roof that establishes a powerful sense of a central focus and symmetry that is ignored and contradicted by multiple off-center front facing gables. It looks like a design by a committee that couldn't agree on a main architectural theme. Its something your designer should try to fix while its still possible.

Start over with a competent architect.

I think it might be possible to pull the front of the main house out until the foot print is square, put a 6 in 12 hipped roof on it and let the garage projection the same on the front and sides (say 4 ft) so the roof of the projection part can be hipped at the corner and wrap around. It might have to be 12 in 12 slope. The entry portico could be 8 ft wide and project enough for the porch to be 8 ft deep with a roof at a 6 in 12 slope.

The projecting front facing gables could be removed and replaced by a roof pediment above the eave line. It might project a bit but I think a full height gable projection contradicts and weakens the dominant hipped roof form.

This would create a simple but elegant four-square form that could be detailed as a Craftsman, Prairie or Colonial Revival. In any case, the eave overhang should be greater and there should be a strong horizontal frieze board under it. The double-hungs could have mullions in the top sash and where you need a shorter window make them awnings the size of a typical double-hung upper sash.

The stair should be reversed so it discharges at the first floor on the Family Room side with an elongated tread with a curved or wrap around end. The closet at the stair should be moved to the other side under the stair and the pantry could be made a bit deeper. (I assume there is no basement)

An alternative would be to make the main roof side gabled and place front facing gables at either end.

JDS, thank you for a constructive comment. Can you explain the difference between a pediment and a gable? I thought a pediment was detailing in a gable... I googled it, but it's still not very clear.

There is a basement, so there will be stairs going down there.

I agree on the garage roof angling, we will incorporate that. The frieze board was my first comment back to him.

One of the design challenges was creating all the space we need without exceeding the FAR requirements. I need a minimum 16x20 uninterrupted space for a full size pool table. This resulted in the second floor needing to be smaller than the first to stay under FAR requirements (in conjunction with all the other things we wanted). Pulling the front forward puts us over too. As it is we are pushing max build space. Thank you for your comments, and if you could clarify the gable/pediment comment I might be able to incorporate that too.

little tid-bit, in my area most new homes are this neo-classical style that everyone keeps turning their nose up at. this "design by committee" style is what is selling really quickly and is the current trend. Fight it as much as you want from a traditionalist standpoint, but the trend is real. So much so, that in a neighbouring town this is the only style that the neighbourhood review board is approving.

The style that is common today is neo-eclectic; neo-classical style was popular in the early 20th century and usually had have prominent classical front columns often two stories tall.

Although all architectural styles use some earlier design elements, neo-elcecticism is unusual in the fact that it uses these elements in an almost random manner often in direct contradiction to how they were once used.

A pediment is the triangular part of a Greek temple above the horizontal entablature which rests on columns. The triangular form was originally made of wood and acted as the horizontal element of a post and beam system.

The term "gable" is more general and can refer to a pediment or just the double sloped top of a wall as in an end gable or gable dormer.

It would help a lot if you provided a front elevation. Where is the pool room?

The front elevation is the first picture. Do you mean something different? Pool room is in the basement. It's the space below the kitchen/family room.

The first drawings are perspectives from low corner viewpoints with foreshortening so proportions are difficult to see. The rest of the drawing are scaled elevations viewed perpendicular to the facades.

It would also help if the plans were of a higher resolution or the dimensions and notes were larger.

You have so many restrictions on the design that any suggestions require testing dimensions and they are currently not visible.

Hip roofs need to be built steeper if they are to read equally-steep to the gables placed next to them. So the roof seems to lack focus.

Casey

It appears to me that the structural design of this house will be complex. Complexity has a direct relationship to monetary cost.

Poolroom,

Have you seen the elevation done on Sketch-up so you can see the different elevations from all angles and a variety of distances? When we started to build, we had only seen our house from elevation pictures. The real house, when framed out, was quite unattractive, Yet, the elevations pictures had been pleasing to the untrained eye at least. We were told after framing, that elevation pictures were a bird's eye view. As if we would have ever seen our house floating up in the air!!! On the ground it was an eye sore, but the birds, at least, had a nice view LOL. After showing GardenWeb the disasterous start to our home build, and getting help from the likes of Casey and others, we ended up having to rip off our newly framed garage (a tall gable) and replacing the garage roof with a flat roof/deck combo. It looks better now, but I believe other aspects of the house could have been improved upon if we had been able to pan around and see the various views from Sketch-up to see what the house would look like more in 3D. Learn from our costly mistake.

Carol

If you could move the master to the front right corner, this might work.

Great improvement in too many ways to count!

OMG, what JDS did is 1000x better.

I like the dog.

JDS, thank you for taking the time to do that. Feedback is a gift, and I appreciate yours. This does help clarify some things for me.

Wow! Looks great! Nice job.

Thanks but please don't mistake this for a complete design; its just a story and a half idea that lowers the mass of the house and avoids a big hipped roof on a 2 story box. Its got a long way to go to be a house design.

Looks like a good family--two dogs! Good work JDS!

Following with interest.

@JDS -- how does the top floor change? I'm not sure but your new design seems to be smaller or something?