These are fathouses:
A fathouse is any single-story dwelling where the distance from the peak of the roofline to the bottom of the eaves is greater than the distance from the bottom of the eaves to the finished grade around the house.
Fathouses happen when you use an entirely too-steep roof pitch on a large-footprint house, for no real good reason. 90% of the time, fathouses have hipped roofs, because if you built a fathouse with a normal gable roof then people would be tempted to bash a couple windows into the side, and then you’ve have a 1 1/2 story, and that shit’s not hip, dawg. (You also wouldn’t have a fathouse anymore.)
Fathouses look like shit.
You can avoid fathousedom by using a lower roof pitch, like so:
Residential builders had this down for about 50-odd years until they got together and decided, “hey, houses should suck more.”
Alternately, you can keep the higher roof pitch, but shrink the footprint. Like this:
One thing I’ve always wondered about Mr. Shafer is, how big is his boyfriend’s place? I mean, the guy’s bed is in this little loft under a pitched roof. His head barely hits the top just sitting up. The vertical space limitations would preclude doggy or any kind of riding position. I have to figure the dude’s bf has like a 4000 square foot modernistic-type house, which provides the necessary contrast that makes his little 80-square-foot thing palatable.
Of course, if you shrink the footprint and reduce the roof pitch, you get:
Yep, “Craftsman” Bungalow. Ideal of liberal intellectuals everywhere. The official house of everywhere west of the Mississippi.
All of these are better looking. Your 50′s rancher, your Austin/Heights/SoCal bungalow, your “tiny house” / sugar daddy boyfriend, these are all preferable to fathouses.
That said, I wouldn’t propose to ban fathouses. For one thing, it goes against my philosophy of choice. For another thing, all the hip urban planning types are big into steep roof pitches anyway (except when they’re not), and once you actually got a roof-pitch-standards process going, added in a bunch of AICP types, you’d probably end up enthroning fathouses and banning 50′s ranchers with that oh-so-awesome 2:12.
So yeah, I wouldn’t try it.
keephoustonhouston
