It looks lopsided to me- like the right side is all scaled up from the left. And the eaves look a bit small to me. I feel like the windows are also not balanced, but that could be addressed easily with landscaping. The scale of small left side and big right side could also be balanced with landscaping, I bet.

Not a Pro. The facade seems a bit overwrought esp. the roof. Think long and hard about the arched windows as they are difficult (and expensive) to dress. Ditto the small square windows, if they face east or west you may have problems with sunlight directly in your eyes during part of the day.

If you have a "very good architect", take their advice.

How do we dress this house up a bit more?

IMO you need to dress it down and find some cohesive design idea. I would start by deleting or at least shortening the 2 narrow towers and getting the cornice heights under control.

Where is the project located?

It already seems to be overdressed to me. All those redundant little square windows are doing nothing except creating problems when you decorate the interior. Actually, it was surprising to hear this came from an architect. I thought you'd found some leftover McMansion plans and were going to get an architect to tweak them to your liking. Maybe this is a good style for your locale, but it could be much better, IMO. Landscaping will help but it won't change those little windows.

Some harsh comments here but frankly they're consistent for a reason. The house gets bigger the further right you go. The gables/hip roofs seem tucked within each other, overlapping, for unclear reasons. The arched windows combined with square windows are a curious pairing. The columns flanking the door seem overly grand. This idea: "IMO you need to dress it down and find some cohesive design idea" is the core of it.

However, it sounds like you're pretty far down the road already, and won't want to blow the whole design up. That's pretty reasonable at this point. And this is not a terrible house -- certainly not mcmansionhell.com. I'd just think very hard about making the left side symmetrical to the right, and about getting rid of the square windows.

As an architect and with another architect currently under retainer I'm not going to comment on specific solutions without his/her permission but I will say it'll be hard to get any meaningful feedback without a floor plan. And beware, floor plan reviews here are brutal but usually for good reasons...LOL..... but sometimes not.

But just a quick thought about design in general. A quote by Steve Jobs.....

"People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

But good luck with your build. Exciting times ahead!

You don't see many towers with little windows above big arched openings and a small hipped roof on top simply because that tends to look like a clown face. Architects are taught to not do that in design school and not in a gracious or kindly manner.

I don't offer to provide architectural design services beyond reviewing drawings for errors when another architect is still under contract but free critiques seem appropriate when a design has gone so far astray.

Of course, many of the "architects" referenced on the forum turn out to not be architects. Remember, there's no such ting as an unregistered architect in North America. We don't know where the project is located but I would guess its not in Kansas..

I will repeat what I feel I need to say far too often: don't try t design a house from a single elevation. If you want assistance show all of the elevations. I understand why you might want to avoid a review of your plans; that usually turns into a free for all.

Dressing up is not the direction I would go IMO a bit mcmansion already it is IMO very lopsided I think in any good design less is more and all those little windows make no sense and IMO in FLA you could have a basketball court in the backyard

"...our flor plan is pretty much done..."

Do you understand that a floor plan and the exterior design and architectural style are mirror images of one another?

The exterior cannot be changed without changing the interior. And vice versa.

if you really seek substantive exterior changes, you and your architect have to return to the interior organization and rethink it.

Everything else is simply changing the mascara.

The OP appears to have disappeared. I get a "page not found" when checking his profile. Looks like he wasn't actually looking for help.

You’ve got a terrible program that’s driving the drafter’s terrible exterior. Get that basketball court outside and in the back yard. Unless you’re building a high school, trying to marry a gymnasium type volume to a “normal” scaled personal residence is doomed to fail. You’d need something more Biltmore scaled in order to not have that court be the 50 pound non absorbed second twin tumor on the side of the house’s face. Then there is the rest of the window dressing trying to distract the eye from the tumor. It’s offensive to the eyes. More tulle on a hairy 300 pound dancer doesn’t turn them into a sleek and graceful 90 pound ballerina.

Either accept that your eccentric program that you gave the drafter is driving a pretty awful looking house, or accept that you need to do the painful surgery to eliminate that indoor basketball court. And hire a real architect. One that tells you all of these painful truths that the drafter wouldn’t tell you. You found someone to draw up your bad ideas. Not someone who is skilled in design and who tells you that your ideas are bad and result in a very poorly proportioned structure.

I think the OP left.

It is hard when an essential part of the program (here a basketball court) is way out of scale with the rest of the program (house), there is no great solution and it is what it is. Abandoning the desired basketball court OR finding a larger lot and making a separate large-scaled building are probably not options here, so you do your best and yes plant lots of trees & vines. In south Florida planting a jungle shouldn’t be a problem :)

I’m working on an existing residential building like this, a huge volume space with 13’ eaves with ceiling height of 21’ attached to smaller-scale program, for an eccentric owner with huge “toys” to store.