Maybe I am all wet, but what's wrong with leaving it like this? I think it's quite elegant and yet simple. The work appears to be well done and looks great with the embellishments that are there.

I'll probably add some shutters to the windows, but thought it looked a bit plain without accent pieces over windows. Might be fine as is, but every other house I've seen has those accent pieces.

Edit: As someone pointed out, I realize now that "soldier course" might be referring to vertical bricks rather than stone, so I probably should have titled the post as "accent stone or lintel."

The house is not plain. You actually have a lot going on with the shakes and the stone work. You don't need to add anything else to "tart it up". It's classy right now.

I prefer a single-piece lintel if you can manage it. Could be wood over the garage door openings. Otherwise I'd be happy if the stone looks like it is self supporting -- can't make out the detail on my phone. Personally don't care for the look of free-floating stone veneer over openings, others might disagree. Good luck!

So all soldier courses above wall openings are "unconvincing and non-traditional"?

(Even if their use goes well back into the 19th Century.)

(An exuberant style now often effectively prohibited by height limitations.)

*****

To OP. Looks fine as is. If you insist on contrasting lintels, make them big.

Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't planning to put brick over the windows, but rather either putting the same stone as is on the rest of the house, but laser cut into squares, over the windows. Or maybe even some other kind of stone for contrast (or a lintel) over the windows.

I photoshopped some shutters and a one piece lintel above the window -- what about this?

"So all soldier courses above wall openings are "unconvincing and non-traditional"? (Even if their use goes well back into the 19th Century.)"

Those are all arched with a keystone...makes a difference.

A convincing lintel on this house would have to be much bigger than your Photoshop, and the lintel over the garage doors even bigger to make it proportionally correct in a structural sense.

Plus your shutters too would have to be much wider to look like they could actually cover the windows. I would leave it as it is. It looks just fine now.

One of the worst things that has happened in the last 20 years or so is builders who really have no sense of design deciding to make their homes more "fancy" so they look more "impressive". So they add five different types of siding to the front of the house, with three different types of roofs, with...you get the point. Usually the most "simple" look is the most elegant. A well designed house doesn't need lots of from-frou.

They DO make Bifold exterior shutters.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CaiTjyFn9oo

arched with a keystone

Bad example.

But, see, for example, these:

Mass produced wrought iron, and then steel, have allowed decorative brick soldier courses to replace supporting lintels for two-hundred years.*

It all depends on how much "honest use of materials" matters to you (and to anyone else). For example, stone masonry and later, brick masonry, were wonderful materials for building in compression. That is, one could stack them on top of one another vertically, and they would retain their natural strength, until stacked so high they became unstable. Then thicker walls and pilasters were the answer for stabilty. The problem with load-bearing masonry comes with tension loads, resulting from attempting to span openings, such as doors and windows, those pesky things that buildings have required for centuries! At first, the Greeks used stone lintels to span across openings and carry the loads. Later the resourceful Romans figured out arches to do the same thing using the same masonry materials. On and on it when throughout architectural history using load-bearing materials with more and greater openings until the days of the "flying buttresses" in the Renaissance which made load-bearing masonry appear almost weightless! Unfortunately, flying buttresses never caught on in the residential building field, and for hundreds of years many builders have used iron, later steel, lintels to span openings and paste masonry on the exterior as if it could float! Unfortunately, your house is one of those with floating masonry over all the openings. If it doesn't bother you, then leave it! If architectural history and honesty of materials is important to you, then have your contractor pull off the lower pieces of veneer and install supporting lintels of wood or plaster, simulating concrete, at the appropriate depth--the wider the span the greater the depth. Good luck on your project!

worthy to my eye a true soldier course of stone would make me feel uneasy; stone is heavier than brick! I might be more sensitive to this kind of detail than others because, earthquakes. I think ddauksas might really be referring to a flat arch (the pre-1850 duplex looks like that to me)?

Stone house flat arch or lintel

ddauksas, what is in your plan drawings? what does your architect suggest? The application of thin stone over the current veneer does not sound appealing to me, maybe worthy and Fred S might weigh in on that.

[Oops posting same time as Virgil Carter. Good idea about a simulated concrete lintel!]

So that's why traditional-style homes with no pretense of a lintel at all bother me. Though many designers are fine with them.

The well-known 30,000 sf stone mansion at the Estates at Alpine, N.J. has both faux lintels and floating stone.

Note appropriate sizing of the porte cochere and garage lintels below.

This is what happens when you try to widen an opening with a flat arch like the duplex.

A soldier course will not hold up a masonry wall, and doesn't even look like it will. It looks more like they will drop out one by one as you walk underneath.

The steel IS the lintel. No pretense about it.

http://iglintels.com/lintels/standard-lintels/single-leaf-lintels/ 

A soldier course is just that, a decorative row of bricks standing up rather than stacked, nothing more. It does not hold up anything. Pretending it would is pretentious.

pre·ten·tious - adjective:

attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.

"Note appropriate sizing of the porte cochere and garage lintels below."

Your arched "lintel" above is generally not as deep as a flat lintel. Due to the physics involded, a flat lintel must be much stronger than an arch.

This is what happens when you try to widen an opening with a flat arch

--which was likely never more than decorative.

I have a pic off-line of a 19th C. home I bought where the p.o. had done just that--except there were two storeys above the widened opening; to "support" the new opening, he put a 1"x10" laid flat. (This handiwork was concealed in the wall of an addition off the back of the home.) For some reason, nothing had moved. Still hadn't when I sold it a year later. Not my problem!

A "lintel" is a horizontal support at the top of an opening. An arch is not a lintel; its just an arch and is self-supporting. A brick soldier course in a solid masonry wall can be structural without additional support for an opening up to about 3 ft wide. This is where the tradition came from. It is now entirely decorative.

Well built brickwork over an opening is self-supporting to an extent. You can see from the photo of the failed lintel that there is an area of failure shaped like a cone above the door. The brick outside of the cone is self-supporting and the brick inside the cone needs additional support from a lintel. In other words, a lintel only has to support the cone of brick that is shown failing in the photo. So, it often only takes a segmented (low) arch or steel angle to support brick above a window or door opening. When an opening gets as wide as a 2 bay garage in a one story house, the structure above it should be wood rather than masonry IMO.

Brick and stone used together in an opening must be carefully detailed because they have different coefficients of expansion and one may cause the joints of the other to crack. Any material property that introduces tension forces in a masonry wall can cause big trouble.

But the OP apparently meant the soldier course to be of cut stone rather than brick not that it would be anymore structurally sound. There could be no realistic stone that could span the garage door opening.

Architecturally speaking, I find the stone too dark and the roof lines too low which I find to be more serious issues than the lack of realistic masonry detailing. If the stone is an imitative cladding, I recommend replacing it with cedar shingles (like the dormer hiding behind the porch roof), at least at the garage and somehow raising the eaves or adding color where possible.

Here is a simple header design from medieval France:

Wood lintel for large opening

So two-bay garage openings should have massive wood or plaster lintels a la medieval France? (Even if they're not really supporting anything.) Anything else is dishonest?

Well, I suppose an alternative to an actual lintel or arch over an exterior opening might be to paint one on the surface of the wall material...

It's a joke folks...an attempt at a little levity in this long thread...

We all know that in the really old days, when load-bearing masonry was used, that openings all had to have some means of supporting the heavy masonry above each and every opening. Wood balloon framing (later platform framing) construction changed all that, since openings could be spanned with integral wood beams within the stud walls. Thereafter, masonry (stone and brick) became veneer and didn't support anything other than its own dead weight. Iron and, later steel, framing made it technically possible to span large openings with wood framing clad with masonry veneer. Thus, these days it's all about aesthetics and how things look. So folks care about such things, and other's don't. Some folks don't even understand the issue. It's what makes for interesting conversations...

The arch form with a keystone is certainly one historically accurate way of framing an opening with masonry. It just isn't historically accurate for horizontal openings. Like all of the discussions here, at the end of the day you should do what is most appealing to you. Thanks for raising the question and allowing all of us to have fun discussing it from every perspective!

Its not so much a matter of honesty as it is of avoiding the use of building systems and details that contradict the old design traditions that are apparently being emulated. The result can be the dumbing down of the original architectural charm and style as is evident in this case, causing the owner to seek ways to add it back. IMO that would require the removal of too much stone cladding to be economically feasible.