A home theater is usually the room a big plan finds space for once everything else is placed, which is how so many of them end up as windowless boxes off a hallway nobody walks down. Plan 70613SND drew this one early. It sits upstairs in a wing of its own, with a wet bar … Read more
Plan 95103RW makes one decision most two-storey plans avoid: the entire adult household lives on the ground floor, and the stairs belong to everybody else. Master suite, den, kitchen, living room, laundry and the garage door are all main level, all under 10-foot ceilings, spread across 102 feet of frontage. What that costs is lot … Read more
A grain silo on a house elevation is usually a costume. This one is the stair. Plan 95043RW puts its entire vertical circulation inside a round, top-lit tower on the front wall, which is why every other volume here gets to stay a plain shed or gable and still holds the eye. What is inside … Read more
Two moves on plan 270039AF exist to make a large house look like a smaller one, and both of them earn their cost. The gambrel roof folds a full second storey inside the roofline instead of stacking it on more wall. The garage swings off the corner at an angle and takes 584 square feet … Read more
The dining room on this plan is carpeted and wainscoted, and you reach it through a segmental arch a few steps inside the front door. That is the argument the whole main floor makes: the sightlines are genuinely open, and the rooms survived anyway. The kitchen sits at the hinge of all of them, the … Read more
Two garage doors sit in the front of this house, one wide and one narrow, under a charcoal tile roof that never climbs past a single storey. From the street, plan 95189RW is a low Tuscan house: cream limestone veneer, smooth stucco, an arched portico with a black iron gate, and 2,380 heated square feet … Read more
The standard advice on a plan this size is to build up, because a second storey is the cheapest square footage you will ever buy: no extra footing, no extra roof. Plan 95219RW takes that advice and then largely ignores it. Three bedrooms and a loft are all that sit at the top of the … Read more
Volume is the most expensive square footage in any house, because you pay to frame it, roof it, finish it and heat it, and then nobody stands in it. Plan 73330HS spends that money once, deliberately, in a single 18-foot room at the back, and arranges 3,634 heated square feet around the consequences: four bedrooms … Read more
Advice for a view lot usually says wrap the deck, so there is somewhere to sit whatever the sun is doing. Plan 135233GRA does the opposite. Forty-eight feet of covered deck goes on the downhill wall and nowhere else, backed by a ceiling that climbs to just under 15 feet on its way to the … Read more
The standard advice on Victorian homes is to add. More trim, more color, more pattern, another bracket under the eaves. It is backwards. The Victorians that still look right forty years after their restoration are the edited ones, and the houses that read like a theme restaurant are almost always the ones where somebody kept … Read more
