This just came up, as the DW is spending days on Zillow, finding our next nest. She found one of these abortions, and it honestly looked great from the curb shot. I then asked her to go through the interior shots, and video, to find where the dormers are? After a few minutes I hear, "this is too stupid to believe, you have got to come see this". Yep, she found them. One in the living room, second in the foyer, and the third in the attic.
So what's the big deal with this? Why is having a dormer into the attic such a big deal? It probably costs an extra $500 at the time the house was built, whatever, and now it probably preserves the outside appearance of the house. I'd rather have a "stupid" dormer to nowhere in the attic than have a house that looks goofy from the outside because it appears to be missing a dormer where there should be one.
I mean, I'll admit to being an architectural moron, but really, what's the huge sin in an extra dormer, especially if it "looked great from the curb shot"?
I think the main issues are that architecture needs to look good on
both the outside and the inside, that architectural styles that feature dormers and ones that feature vaulted ceilings tend to be disjoint sets, and that form (at least loosely) follows function. A window designed to be opened and/or dressed with curtains, but which is placed in such a way that actually doing so is impractical, is functionally stupid and therefore architecturally wrong.
I noticed this pic in the roof article:
The author missed* the worst sin on that facade, which is the fact that the third-story Palladian window has fake shutters
installed backwards (possibly because they wouldn't fit under the gable if installed correctly)!
I am of the opinion that shutters should either actually be operable or shouldn't be installed at all. However, even if you want shutters just for the aesthetics, it should at least
appear as if they could be operable, which means that if they were to be folded in they should match the shape of the window.
Really, that window shouldn't even exist at all. But since it does, the builder should have used simple rectangular shutters like he did on the other Palladian window on the left. (And then he shouldn't have used shutters on that window, since it's a double window and the shutters aren't wide enough to cover it anyway. Or if we're expected to assume they would be bifold shutters with four segments, why not expect us also to assume fanfold shutters for the triple windows elsewhere on the facade?)
(*I understand the article was about roofs, but it at least deserved an arrow labeled "LOLWUT" or something.)