![]() Thatch is used occasionally on new dwellings and demands a roof pitch of at least 45°, and more likely 50°, to allow the rain to flow off quickly and prevent ingress. “This ensures that the roofs of the shallow- plan buildings will not become too high and therefore out of proportion.” “With cottages, defined by the small spans of the trusses that link the walls at eaves level and the dominant roofs, it is often considered best to produce a U-shaped plan form, or even an M-shape, with two ridges side by side,” Richard says. In general this will look far better on single-storey square-shaped houses, where the roof is bigger relative to the walls. With square-shaped houses with pitched roofs – a deep plan is considered very energy efficient these days – a lesser pitch, perhaps 42.5°, can look fine on roofs that are hipped on all four sides (pyramidal). The effect of this is to emphasise the roof. “However, this is far better than 45° and my style is to sweep the roof down low over the eaves and reduce the height of the outer wall in the upper storey rooms,” he says. More often than not he has to use 48° in order to meet the demands of planners. “My favourite when designing an Arts & Crafts house is 51°,” says Richard Cutler (traditional house designer and Arts & Crafts specialist). ![]() A slightly steeper pitch will achieve a much more satisfying result. Most traditional architects today will avoid that pitch when designing houses, and if you ask them why, a good number will say it’s because it does not conform to the Golden Ratio. To underline this, many house designers quote Sir Edwin Lutyens - probably the most famous of British architects, revered for the quality of his country houses. Without going into the minutiae that are drilled into all students at architectural school, the Golden Ratio (a ratio of about 1:1.62) simply acts as a benchmark against which any architect that finds a design unsatisfactory can test his intuition. The other essential ingredient is the view of the planning officer.ĭesigners are often asked to reduce the pitch of a roof by planners because it is considered to have too great an impact on the adjacent buildings. Add a hip or two and the costs increase again. In general, the steeper the pitch, the more materials used, and so the more expensive it gets. Nowadays many things militate against this.
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