Looking for ways to entertain myself while walking the dog, I used to count the number of different planes I saw on house’s roofs. Some new construction homes have well over 20 different planes. With each additional gable or overhang, the planes can add up quite quickly.
How many different flat surfaces does your house’s roof have? If you don’t live in a house, feel free to describe a house in which you used to live or anything else.
Using these examples the open gable (top row, 2d from left) has 2 planes. The hip (top row R) has 4.
Mine has 10. Split level - 4 planes top story, 3 planes main level, 3 planes ground-level addition.
Used to be 2 but we put up an addition which is slightly taller than the original. If they joined up at the same height it would still be 2. My neighbor’s house has 0, it has a Bow Roof.
The house is a single story ranch shaped like a L with the attached garage hanging off the bottom L
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The 3 arms are all open gable (2 planes each). The inside the top L was a patio that a previous owner enclosed, expanding the living room. The expanded area has a flat roof - adding a 7th plane.
Two. My house is a plain ranch-style, almost, but not quite just a rectangle with an open gable roof. It almost looks like the open gable example in your link.
A bit off the subject, but you might be wondering why I said my house was “almost, but not quite” a rectangle. One architectural oddity of this house is that one of the smaller bedrooms sticks out about two feet from the back of the house. It’s like the architect who designed the floor plan couldn’t figure out how to fit three bedrooms in the available footprint, so he just went “screw it” and added this tiny extension on the back of the house to accommodate the third bedroom. But the roof still continues on the same plane as the rest of the house. Which means the roof is lower there. Which means the ceiling in that bedroom does a weird step down thing where it’s about a foot lower in the back of the room compared to the rest of the room (and the rest of the house) due to the lower roof.
My old house built in 79’ had 3.
New home built 3 years ago probably around 20. Must be a building trend going on. I hate to see the bill for when I have to replace this roof.
I probably won’t live until this roof needs replacing, but the long term cost was still a big reason why I didn’t want to do anything fancier. I’m sure the tiles will hold up over time, but every place those different planes join also creates potential leakage, and the gutters become more complex and prone to leaking and clogging at every corner. I even had additional drainage work done so I didn’t end up with 80 foot long gutter runs going to just one side of the house.
Some people like the look, and if I was a roofing contractor I wouldn’t try to talk them out of it.
Four. My house is a basic rectangle with what is mostly a standard roof with no windows. But the right and left ends of the roof are separate slopes rather than the main roof coming out all the way to the side walls. Looking it up, I see this is called a hipped roof.
Eleven. I went outside and counted them twice. Which proves we really need to get past this damned virus and get out more. (No offense to OP, it’s more interesting that what I was doing at the time)
The original built-in-the-50s house was a two story box with a single story extension for a mudroom / garage. So four.
About a decade ago the owners added a substantial single story extension into the back yard for a living room and master suite. The roof is essentially two ridges perpendicular to the main ridge, so two sets of traditional two planes separated by a flatter plane that slopes up to the main house (meeting it about half way up the second story). That adds five. It sounds complicated but it isn’t too bad. We replaced the entirety of the single story planes last year for around $9k. The double story planes are dirt simple (and only a couple of years old at this point anyway).
Federation is the architectural style in Australia prevalent from around 1890 to 1915. Most homes have asymmetric gables and multiple roof pitches/planes.
A classic of the style would be Alba Longa
The PT abode is a bit humbler but still has 12 different roof planes.
No planes on our roof, but once a year we get a sleigh and some reindeer up there.
OK, I’m sorry! But someone was going to make that joke at some point, it might as well be me.
Serious answer: our house started life as a simple box ranch, so originally 2. But along the line two additions were constructed that are different heights, for a total of 6 planes.
So far, all respondents but one have what I would consider relatively simple roofs. As my house demonstrates, w/ a hipped roof, more than 1 level quickly adds up the number of planes. But my roof is still far simpler than what I see on most of the new construction around me, with numerous gables/dormers - some multi-faceted, porch overhangs, even the occasional cupola or whatever.
As penultima observes upthread, there have always been “complex” roofs. But my sister has commented about when did it become common to build homes for the masses that resembled fairy tales, rather than just basic “houses.” You know how a kid draws a house? When I walk around my neighborhood, looking at the new homes I can say, “That one’s a farmhouse. There’s a castle. Hmm - New England whaling village…” Whereas the older homes are ranch, split-level, 2-story, cape cod…
