Am I reading your other post correctly where you say the SOG cost is $75 finished? Yikes!!!

I like that courtyard in the center. I assume Austin doesn't get much rain, so the little you get down that pitched roof towards the center will water some "indoor" vegeation?

The square came off well. It is so hard to make a symmetric form look good IMHO.

Maaan, that is some serious rock you Texans must deal with. I guess each region has its own challenges, eh?

Hmmm. Yes, big gutters, and in Dallas we will get a bit more than in Austin. However, the peak load is probably the same. We will have 5"x5" square gutters around the perimeter with two downspouts and a trench drain on the floor of the atrium too. As for the foundation, we have roughly 1400sqft of slab and the garage and $15/sqft should do it. It is not really SOG as the foundation will be suspended over the soil.

Yeah, I kind of like the simplicity and elemental nature of pure forms in architecture, but there are two things that can kill that for me. First, they can come off as gimicky. Although we kicked the idea around a bit, having all windows be squares clearly pushed it too far. I certainly didn't want "square" to be the theme of the house (every light fixture and mirror to be square, etc.). Second, going with a pure geometric shape can really negativly affect function. On this issue though, we really licked out that everything we wanted fits pretty well. I think the only concessions we have made here are the lack of coat closets (that central atrium is major source of this problem which we skirted by using wardrobes from Ikea) and that I would have preferred a slightly larger laundry room and kid's playroom on the second floor. Also, we don't need such a large master bedroom. But no plan is perfect and these are small problems.

On the other hand, we do have extra glass and exterior wall in the atrium, but at the same time, the simple shape does help on the cost front.

Charles Eames once said something like "Design is largely determined by constraints" and we placed plenty of them. Number one, the city requires at least a 5:12 pitch. One original design option called for a 20'x84' footprint with a simple gabled roof (I still wonder how that would have turned out). When we pulled this idea together, we found that we could have our 5:12 pitch with a flat roof look. But this necessitated that the roof (and therefore the massing of the house) be kept really simple. I kind of like the result that the house looks really simple (boring even) from the outside, but from the inside, the design becomes really dynamic. Not only do we have the central court, but the vaulted ceiling on the second floor with the inverted hip roof will be pretty cool. Also, because there is a 23' maximum wall height restriction, the ceiling on the second floor starts at 7' and rises to 12'5" at the outer wall. This also means the top of the exterior wall in the atrium will be at 16', which I expect will mean that the atrium won't feel too much like an elevator shaft.

If we had an extra $25k, what would I do to change it? I think I would just make the whole thing a bit bigger. Instead of a 40'8"x40'8" footprint and a 12'4"x12'4" atrium, I would make it a 42'x42' footprint with a 13'x13' atrium (or maybe a 40'x44' footprint with a 12'x16' atrium).

We are going with the boxy look ourselves and were inspired by the little white boxes of Irving Gill's California architecture of the 1920's. I have this fear of the house being to boring but then it is the shape that makes sense to us. I have yet to post our design images online but hope to do this soon. What you describe sounds soo much like our situation. We are in a historic neighborhood in Memphis and somehow got a flat roof above with the historic commission because there are houses of similar design to ours with flat roofs and boxy from the 1920's. Ah the wonderful surprises in Memphis!

Have you put your house together on Google Skechup? It's free and doesn't take long to learn how to use.

I wish we could say we were in a historic neighborhood (and blame that for the restrictions), but it is much worse than that. The fact is that our lot is in a neighborhood of 700-1100sqft ranch houses from the 1950s that the city really wishes was full of 1920s mansions. As Farmers Branch has no such neighborhood, they are trying to create one. The special zoning ordinance for the neighborhood is aimed at generating what they call "old-world" style houses. French Chateau and English Tudor dominate the new construction and sadly, as bad as that is, many are not well done at that. I am particularly amused by the one with three fake haylofts. That most of them were designed by an architect really shocks me.