The mistake buyers make with narrow lot house plans is treating width as the only thing that shrank. It is not. Both long walls of the house end up sitting a few feet off a property line, which changes what the building code will let you put in them, and the garage door stops being … Read more
The front of this house is mostly roof. Two steep gables sit at either end of a single storey, the entry is recessed under a stained timber truss between them, and there is no garage door anywhere in the elevation because the garage is turned to face the side. That pitch is not styling. It … Read more
A formal symmetrical elevation and a rear wall that disappears are two different houses, and plan 86083BS is both. It spends its street face on white stucco, dark shutters and a centred entry bay, then turns 4,068 square feet of one-level living toward a lanai, an outdoor kitchen and a lap pool. Four bedroom suites, … Read more
A two-story great room is usually paid for upstairs, in bedrooms that never got drawn. Plan 16919WG pays for it in a different currency: the family room’s ceiling runs to 20 feet, and the second floor becomes a rim around that void rather than a floor laid across it — a game room at the … Read more
The stair up to the bonus room starts at the back door. It is drawn beside the lockers and the half bath, in the entry you use coming in from the garage, which means the fifth bedroom on this plan is reached without crossing the great room or passing a single bedroom door. Everything else … Read more
A vaulted ceiling is normally sold as a room-level upgrade: one space gets height, and the rest of the house carries on at eight or nine feet. Plan 135188GRA treats it as structure instead. One gable roughly twenty feet wide runs the entire depth of the building, and the great room is simply the middle … Read more
Plan 52269WM is drawn as a two-storey farmhouse and built almost entirely on the ground floor. Of 2,796 heated square feet, 2,176 sit on the main level — master suite, kitchen, laundry, dining room, study — and the stair leads to 620 square feet holding two bedrooms and their two baths. Nothing else is up … Read more
Plan 56510SM sells on the two things its title names, and only one of them is as good as it looks. The wraparound porch is drawn 8 feet deep across the front. The home office is 10 by 7 feet behind sliding barn doors. What actually carries this house is neither — it is a … Read more
“Two-story great room” gets read as a ceiling height. It is really a hole in the floor above it, and the question worth asking is what the upstairs gives up to keep that hole open. On plan 135404GRA the upstairs gives up being a floor at all. Three bedrooms, a Jack and Jill bath, an … Read more
The usual line on a porte cochere is that it is ornament, a few hundred square feet of roof bought over a driveway instead of over rooms. On plan 56522SM it is doing a job no room could do: it carries the roofline across the drive and pulls all four garage bays out of view, … Read more
