BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – THE BIG PICTURES
MAJOR PLAN SETS, FRENCH COUNTRY
ELEVATIONS - NOTES, ROOF EAVE LINES
Elevation Detail, in PDF
The Commentary section of this sheet speaks to the general purpose of the sheet - essentially what the house designers themselves chose among options in specifying and drawing the roof profiles. The motivation of AG and Mrs. AG here was to begin to impress upon both owners and buyers that this roof system is complex: over 30 segments, 7 pitches from near 4:12 to over 16:12, several 3 roof pitches to be derived onsite; 6 different-sized round tops; three skylights; one absolutely humongous roof cricket.
In that context, extremely serious consideration must be made about how to design roof profiles at their eaves. Trade-offs must be made in respecting style and in respecting overall appearance.
The French Country style is forgiving. We can run soffits high, medium, and low on sidewalls and conform. To have done otherwise, i.e., forced equal, relative elevations at the eaves (by holding them steady to a given height) would have forced us into soffits of extraordinarily variant widths...not in-style. We could even vary soffit depth if it interested us, which it didn't. But it might interest others subsequently, and that's one of the good reasons for drawing these sections.
We kept soffits (and overhangs) to 1' overall, letting soffit intersections with wall lines to the laws of geometry.
Indeed, the cheap, short-cut compromise to this roof eave conversation is one we see frequently among tasteless design and construction in even the best of neighborhoods and in the best of magazines, work done by the best of designers and builders: hold a French Country roof system to a single pitch, and hold the eaves to a single level on the horizontal. It's akin to French Country Levittown. To our eyes: cheap, ugly, tasteless, screams stooopid.
And surely, this sheet puts the framers on report that this isn't going to be their father's roof job.
Please note at the foot of this sheet is the legend for exterior finishing to follow in each of the 5 sheets addressing elevations. The AG and Mrs. AG wanted very much to get this schedule and 2 others on each of the elevation sheet, in order to avoid shifting sheets back and forth to figure out what's going on, but there was not enough room on each sheet and moving up to ARCH E (48"x36") size would mean so much more paper to handle...the AG's never been fond of ARCH E - so big it's inconvenient to take in the sheet as a whole, stand back to see it all and get close to read what's there, zoom in and out and in - but with houses this size, it's almost as hard to acceptably get necessary and sufficient information on a given sheet.
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